NIH to Study How Microbes Live in Humans

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NIH to Study How Microbes Live in Humans

The Associated Press

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hcrYQipGc0MWzPE6gfEKdJVgyyMwD8TKOD

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WASHINGTON (AP) — People's bodies are home to trillions of bacteria,

fungi and other microbes, organisms that live on our skin, in our

noses, in our digestive tracts.

Some are helpful, some not. Now government-funded scientists are

about to map the genes of hundreds of these microbes, to better

understand how we coexist with this mysterious netherworld.

The National Institutes of Health announced the $115 million " Human

Microbiome Project " on Wednesday. Researchers will recruit healthy

volunteers to swab for tissue samples, to study what microbial

communities normally exist in different parts of the body and how

they interact with their human hosts.

The project's initial work will start at four sites: Houston's

Baylor College of Medicine, Washington University at St. Louis; the

Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT; and land's J. Craig Venter

Institute.