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UC San Diego Health officials said Wednesday that they are enlisting the public’s help in what they tout as the largest study to date of the human microbiome — the communities of bacteria and other microbes that live in and on the human body and influence our health.

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The Microbiome Immunity Project envisions mapping 3 million bacterial genes and predicting the structure of their associated proteins.

That could help scientists better understand the microbiome’s interaction with human biochemistry and contribution to autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis — and possibly result in new prevention techniques or treatments.

Scientists will tap into the IBM World Community Grid, a volunteer initiative in which internet-connected computers that aren’t being used by their owners can add processing power to experiments.

“Had World Community Grid not existed, we wouldn’t have even contemplated this project,” said Rob Knight, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UCSD.

“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,” said Knight, also a UCSD professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine.

“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.”

Volunteers can get involved with the 13-year-old grid by downloading a secure software program that automatically detects when a computer can offer spare processing power, then taps it to run virtual experiments on behalf of researchers. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can join and sign up to support the Microbiome Immunity Project at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

The grid has been used for 29 projects that studied cancer, HIV/AIDS, Zika, clean water, renewable energy and other challenges. More than 730,000 individuals and 430 institutions from 80 countries have donated more than one million years of computing time from more than three million computers and Android devices, according to UCSD.

The researchers said they will make their data publicly available.

Scientists from the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute of New York are participating in the project.

— City News Service

UCSD Joins Global Call for Microbiome Study Volunteers was last modified: by

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