Constructing the Microbial Biomap for Planet Earth
The Earth Microbiome Project is a proposed massively multidisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise is to examine microbial communities from their own perspective. Hence we propose to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples currently available from researchers across the globe. We will analyze 200,000 samples from these communities using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and amplicon sequencing to produce a global Gene Atlas describing protein space, environmental metabolic models for each biome, approximately 500,000 reconstructed microbial genomes, a global metabolic model, and a data-analysis portal for visualization of all information.
To explore and download the EMP datasets please go to www.microbio.me/emp
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Citing the EMP:
If you are publishing data generated by the EMP, please feel free to include any members of the EMP team who have made a significant contribution to the work as co-authors, although this is not a requirement. The only requirements are:
(1) Add the following text to the methods and acknowledgements: “Sample processing, sequencing and core amplicon data analysis were performed by the Earth Microbiome Project (www.earthmicrobiome.org) and all amplicon and meta data has been made public through the data portal (www.microbio.me/emp).”
(2) The current official citation for the EMP is the initial meeting report, please use this when referencing the EMP in your article: Jack A. Gilbert, Janet K. Jansson, and Rob Knight. “The Earth Microbiome project: successes and aspirations.” BMC biology 12.1 (2014): 69.