The Knight Lab submitted a video entry to the NIH Common Fund Video Contest showing how our work helped rescue researchers from an avalanche of data!
The NIH’s Human Microbiome Project HMP is the largest characterization of microbial communities living on and in the adult healthy human body. The initial HMP effort produced an unprecedented amount of DNA sequence data; tons of A C T and Gs. The Knight Lab improved combined and implemented new computational tools in order to make this mass of data manageable and to allow researchers to tease out patterns. The results of this endeavor revealed that the mouth gut skin and other major body sites harbor unique communities of microscopic inhabitants that is characteristic microbial signatures.