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takyon writes:

A group of scientists have written into the journals Science and Nature , calling for the creation of U.S. and international microbiome initiatives similar in scale to the Human Brain Project:

The White House is already considering increasing its support of research into the workings of these microbial communities, called microbiomes. The new papers "are very thoughtful and have a lot to tell us," said Jo Handelsman, the associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and herself a microbiologist. As to whether there will be a national microbiome initiative, she said, "We don't have anything to announce today."

Microbiomes have become the focus of intense study and public interest. The trillions of microbes that live inside the human body, for example, play important roles in health, from fighting diseases to maintaining a balanced immune system.

[...] As yet, there are few examples of successful manipulation of microbiomes. The best documented is a medical procedure known as fecal transplant. Patients with life-threatening gut infections can be cured by receiving intestinal bacteria from a healthy donor. Yet scientists are still at a loss to explain how individual species of bacteria in such a transplant help battle infections. A fuller understanding might open the way to using microbiome-based treatments for other ailments, from tooth decay to obesity.

Dr. Miller said it might also be possible to tend to microbiomes outside our bodies. Manipulating microbes in farm fields could increase the productivity of crops, for example. The tundra, too, contains vast amounts of methane-generating microbes that could accelerate global warming. Understanding how that microbiome works might lead to ways to control its effects on the climate.

[More after the break.]

[...] Answering the questions will demand new tools to gather and analyze data, Dr. McFall-Ngai said. To understand how microbes behave, for instance, scientists need a better way to see the molecular activity inside them. "We want to pull out individual cells and ask, 'What are they doing?' " Dr. McFall-Ngai said. "We have no methods for that."

In their commentary for Nature, Dr. McFall-Ngai and her co-authors, Nicole Dubilier of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany and Liping Zhao of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, urged the United States to coordinate research efforts on microbiomes with other countries. "Earth's biome is not defined by national borders," they wrote.

The Science article discusses the goals of a U.S.-based Unified Microbiome Initiative (UMI) while the Nature article advocates for the creation of an International Microbiome Initiative (IMI) while discussing the limitations of previous efforts. Areas of emphasis for the UMI include "decrypting microbial genes and chemistries, cellular genomics and genome dynamics, high-throughput, high-sensitivity multiomics and visualization, modeling and informatics, and perturbing communities in situ and tractable model systems".

Original Submission