Making Sense of Our Microbiome
With decades of research into the Human Microbiome, why haven’t we been able to use microorganisms living in human bodies (there are trillions!) for disease prevention and therapeutic interventions? In our Nature-published article, we present GutCyc, a metagenomics tool that resolves data analysis issues faced by medical researchers. This breakthrough paves the way for advancing research on significant human diseases.
The most densely populated area of the human microbiome is the lowest region of the gut, home to microorganisms that play critical roles in nutrition, detoxification, and immune system conditioning. Large scale datasets about the metabolic activity of these organisms are available, compiled from many studies. However, differences in how that data was originally processed make comparative analyses, with their potential to reveal insights into disease prevention and treatment, excessively difficult.
Our approach to this challenge was the creation of a software pipeline, and a collection of pathway genome databases, GutCyc, capable of converting this idiosyncratic data into a form intelligible to domain experts and machines alike. GutCyc provides the consistent annotations and metabolic pathway predictions necessary for analyzing microbial community differences between health and disease states such as inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, type 2 diabetes, and others.
Visit the GutCyc website here: http://www.gutcyc.org/
Read more here: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201735
