We may have learned a lot over the past few years as a civilization, but there’s still a whole lot we don’t know. Now, with the help of the public, IBM wants to conduct the largest ever study of the human microbiome in a feat called The Microbiome Immunity Project. The project’s main mission is to help advance scientific knowledge of the role of these bacteria when it comes to disease.
Funded by IBM, it will conduct millions of virtual experiments using the surplus processing power from volunteer’s computers. In doing this the aim is to map all three million bacterial genes found within the human microbiome. By getting a better understanding of how the microbiome interacts with the human body and certain disease such as Type 1 diabetes, and Crohn’s disease, experts may be able to come up with better treatments or even cures for these diseases.
If you want to get involved with the project and lend some processing power it’s very simple to do. You simply download a secure software program that will automatically detect when some spare processing power is available, then virtual experiments are run on behalf of researchers in the background. The data collated from all of the machines gets analyzed by the project’s research team and made publicly available to other scientists too in an attempt to accelerate the advancement of this knowledge.
“This type of research on the human microbiome, on this scale, has not been done before,” said Dr. Ramnik Xavier, Institute Member and Co-Director of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Chief, Gastrointestinal Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Director, Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s only possible with massive computational power.”
Rob Knight is Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering and Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego and he says, “By harnessing the efforts of volunteers, we can do something that exceeds the scale of what we have access to by a factor of thousands. For the first time, we’re bringing a comprehensive structural biology picture to the whole microbiome, rather than solving structures one at a time in a piecemeal fashion.”
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