Johns Hopkins University geneticists and students, along with more than 150 researchers and students at 40 sites nationwide, are cataloging the nation’s vast and largely unknown soil microbiome—the microorganisms that are key to the ecological functions that sustain human, animal, and plant life.
“The soil is the most biologically active environment on the planet, and yet we’ve sampled only a tiny fraction of life within it,” says computer scientist Michael Schatz, senior author of a related study published in Nature Genetics and JHU’s Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computational Biology and Oncology. “This scientific void we’re trying to fill on microbial diversity could only be accomplished through this network of scientists and students.”
The effort, part of the BioDiversity and Informatics for Genomics Scholars (BioDIGS) consortium, is one of the biggest microbiome studies ever attempted.
It has already resulted in the discovery of more than 1,000 new strains of bacteria and never-before-seen microbes. It also is encouraging the next generation of genetic scientists and strengthening genetics course materials at participating schools. “Students can be very sophisticated data scientists,” says Schatz. “They were involved with sample collection and now we’re leaning on them to help build out the reference genomes of the microbes, to scan and ID genes—everything. We knew we couldn’t do it alone.”
— JILL ROSEN