Feb 16
A mouthful of metagenomics
According to GenomeWeb, The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research are releasing generous funding for research into the role of microbes in human oral health and disease using metagenomic approaches.
Research will target the total oral microbial community using metagenomic approaches built upon recent developments in DNA sequencing, gene assembly, and bioinformatics and the goal is to completely characterize all microbes and their genes in the oral environment - including bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, and parasites.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:21 am
This is pretty cool, and something I’d like to see more of. Meta-genomics “in humans” that is. We are, after all, all of us small eco-systems and I bet there are important medical discoveries waiting for us when we learn more about the bacteria part of the symbiotic system that is us.
For example, how important is the bacteria in our gut for obesity? They are an essential part of our metabolism, so it is not far fetched to think they are a major component here?
March 25th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
[…] follow up on a previous post, researchers funded by the Human Microbiome Project have now launched the Human Oral Microbiome […]