据5月21日的《科学》杂志报道说，为了进一步了解我们与在我们的身体上或身体内生活的多种细菌之间的关系，美国的国立卫生院正在对所有这些微生物的基因组进行测序。
他们研发了对在其自然环境中的微生物进行大规模基因组测序的标准化方法，他们的目标之一是为至少900种将人体称为住所的细菌制作出参照基因组序列。
现在，由Karen Nelson领导的Human Microbiome Jumpstart Reference Strains Consortium已经公布了他们对头178个与人类宿主有关的细菌基因组序列的最初的分析。 到目前为止，这些结果给未来的分析工作提供了一个重要的基线，尽管这些研究人员说，他们只是刚刚触及了人类“微生物组”的表面而已。人类微生物组指的是在人身上发现的所有不同的微生物的总和。
这些研究人员将与其他人共享他们的数据，这样，其他的遗传学家如果试图从自然环境中对大量的微生物基因组做直接采样的话，他们可以参考这些数据。 这一对我们身体上的微生物的更好的理解会在将来对了解某些人类的疾病提供线索。（生物谷Bioon.com）
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生物谷推荐原文出处：
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1183605
A Catalog of Reference Genomes from the Human Microbiome
The Human Microbiome Jumpstart Reference Strains Consortium*
The human microbiome refers to the community of microorganisms, including prokaryotes, viruses, and microbial eukaryotes, that populate the human body. The National Institutes of Health launched an initiative that focuses on describing the diversity of microbial species that are associated with health and disease. The first phase of this initiative includes the sequencing of hundreds of microbial reference genomes, coupled to metagenomic sequencing from multiple body sites. Here we present results from an initial reference genome sequencing of 178 microbial genomes. From 547,968 predicted polypeptides that correspond to the gene complement of these strains, previously unidentified ('novel') polypeptides that had both unmasked sequence length greater than 100 amino acids and no BLASTP match to any nonreference entry in the nonredundant subset were defined. This analysis resulted in a set of 30,867 polypeptides, of which 29,987 (~97%) were unique. In addition, this set of microbial genomes allows for ~40% of random sequences from the microbiome of the gastrointestinal tract to be associated with organisms based on the match criteria used. Insights into pan-genome analysis suggest that we are still far from saturating microbial species genetic data sets. In addition, the associated metrics and standards used by our group for quality assurance are presented.
