Question

Explain the significance of any two historical achievements in proving the role of microorganisms in human health and disease and maintaining health of the environment. Be sure to describe the current classification of microorganisms.

Answer 1

Ans) The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Common Fund established the decade-long Human Microbiome Project (HMP) in 2007. The HMP project was designed to be a community resource to galvanize research, in what was then a young field. The main aim was to create a toolbox with datasets and analytical and clinical protocols for the larger research community to be able to study the microbiome in specific diseases and populations.

- The first phase of the project catalogued a reference dataset of the types of microbes (including bacteria, fungi and viruses) that are associated with five specific body regions: skin, oral cavity, airways, gastrointestinal and urogenital tract, using samples collected from 300 healthy adult men and women.

- They used DNA sequencing technologies adapted from those first developed during the Human Genome Project to analyze these microbial communities. Microbiome-associated diseases are usually not infectious, but have a proportion that can be explained by the human microbiome.

- Researchers used the reference dataset as a roadmap to identify the kinds of microbial community differences that might be associated with such non-infectious diseases or conditions.

There is an important caveat here.

Researchers don’t yet know if a change in a microbial community leads to a disease or if a microbial community changes in response to the development of a disease.

- Although a snapshot of the microbiome measurements were taken in these earlier HMP studies, an understanding of how these communities change over time was needed if these kinds of studies could begin to determine the cause-and-effect relationships of the microbiome with disease. This is especially important because microbial populations in the human body change over one’s lifetime and are affected by diet, stress and other environmental factors.

- The researchers would need to, in effect, make a video of the microbiome and the human body.

- The NIH Common Fund initiated a second phase, the Integrative Human Microbiome Project (iHMP) in 2014. This phase was designed to develop the methods for measuring and analyzing biomolecules such as RNA, proteins and metabolism-linked substances called metabolites from the microbiome and the human host.

- The researchers applied these methods to study three model microbiome-associated conditions: preterm birth, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and prediabetes. The goal was to evaluate which biological properties or suite of properties were proven to be the most useful for gaining insight into these conditions.

- The researchers studied the microbiome of healthy and affected individuals for each of the conditions, over a prolonged period of time.