The Earth Microbiome Project is a systematic attempt to characterize the global microbial taxonomic and functional diversity for the benefit of the planet and mankind

MO BIO Laboratories Inc. is extremely proud to become a corporate sponsor of the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP)!

The EMP is a proposed massively multidisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise is to examine microbial communities from their own perspective. They propose to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples currently available from researchers across the globe. They will analyze 200,000 samples from these communities using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and amplicon sequencing to produce a global Gene Atlas describing protein space, environmental metabolic models for each biome, approximately 500,000 reconstructed microbial genomes, a global metabolic model, and a data-analysis portal for visualization of all information.

The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) will, be a cross-discipline effort, involving microbial ecologists, genomicists, microbiologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and ecosystem modelers, to provide the most comprehensive global assessment of microbial life ever seen. Similar to the Human Genome Project, which has revolutionized biomedicine, the proposed Earth Microbiome Project will revolutionize the way we can assess and model the health of our planet.

The Earth Microbiome Project is actively seeking collaborators who are willing to share their sample collections for this project. Environmental samples such as soil, water on filters, fecal material, leaves, etc. are needed. Samples must be provided with data which will be critical for comparisons between environments. This criteria includes: where the sample was collected, the environmental conditions at the time of collection, time of collection, method of collection and storage. Priority will be given to samples with the richest metadata, for with better contextual information comparison of the subsequent sequence data will be improved. The samples should all be stored in a way compatible with the preservation of microbial communities and DNA/RNA. Anyone interested in participating in this project is encouraged to contact MO BIO at technical@mobio.com for detailed submission criteria and EMP contact information.

MO BIO Laboratories, Inc. welcomes the challenge of supplying a standard nucleic acid isolation method which will help scientists from around the world create a database without bias introduced from sample processing. MO BIO will help sponsor this project through donations of Power™ DNA kits for process validation of the initial 10,000 environmental samples. The kits utilize patented Inhibitor Removal Technology® for removal of enzyme inhibiting substances. It is this same technology which will provide a tool that enables the scientists of the EMP to look at the genomes of the many different microbes living in soil, water, sediment, air and plant specimens.