Talk:Human Microbiome Project

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Freeman.all.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:57, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Date?
If it's a 5-year project, when does it start and end? The Jade Knight (talk) 11:15, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Evaluation
1. The organization of subtopics is confusing to follow. The information that is displayed is relevant, intriguing and detailed but when reading the article through, it was hard to stay focused. Rearranging or possibly changing the titles may be a possible suggestion to keep the reader there. 2. There is minimal information about what is happening in 2016. This project has been around for some time. Is the project done/extended? Are they still getting funded? What is happening now? 3. Add more information to the last two sections. The minimal information displayed questions how important, relevant it is to the article.

A.halldorson (talk) 16:09, 19 September 2016 (UTC)Anna H, IAH206

External links modified
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External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Human Microbiome Project. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101210013519/http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/hmp/ to http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/hmp/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 12:47, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Expanding the page
Hi all,

I am adding a section for the second phase of the project and re-working the intro/goals sections so they're more up-to-date. I will post the original paragraphs here with brief explanations of why I removed/revised them. Additionally, I will leave suggestions for future edits when I'm finished, as I don't intend to address the entire article.

Cheers! Freeman.all (talk) 17:21, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello again!

I made my edits in chunks in case anything needs reverting. Here are the original sections:

1. "The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) was a United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative with the goal of identifying and characterizing the microorganisms which are found in association with both healthy and diseased humans (the human microbiome). Launched in 2008,[1] it was a five-year project, best characterized as a feasibility study, and had a total budget of $115 million. The ultimate goal of this and similar NIH-sponsored microbiome projects was to test how changes in the human microbiome are associated with human health or disease. This topic is currently not well understood.

Important components of the HMP were culture-independent methods of microbial community characterization, such as metagenomics (which provides a broad genetic perspective on a single microbial community), as well as extensive whole genome sequencing (which provides a "deep" genetic perspective on certain aspects of a given microbial community, i.e. of individual bacterial species). The latter served as reference genomic sequences — 3000 such sequences of individual bacterial isolates are currently planned — for comparison purposes during subsequent metagenomic analysis. The microbiology of five body sites was emphasized: oral, skin, vaginal, gut, and nasal/lung. The project also financed deep sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA sequences amplified by polymerase chain reaction from human subjects.[2]"

>The article did not include any information about the second phase of the project; in order to add information about it, I had to rework this section.

2. "As of 2014, it was often reported in popular media and in the scientific literature that there are about 10 times as many microbial cells in the human body than there are human cells; this figure was based on estimates that the human microbiome includes around 100 trillion bacterial cells and an adult human typically has around 10 trillion human cells.[3] In 2014 the American Academy of Microbiology published an FAQ that emphasized that the number of microbial cells and the number of human cells are both estimates, and noted that recent research had arrived at a new estimate of the number of human cells at around 37 trillion cells, meaning that the ratio of microbial to human cells is probably about 3:1.[3][4] In 2016 another group published a new estimate of ratio as being roughly 1:1 (1.3:1, with "an uncertainty of 25% and a variation of 53% over the population of standard 70 kg males").[5][6]

Many of the organisms that make up the human microbiome have not been successfully cultured, identified, or otherwise characterized. Organisms thought to be found in the human microbiome, however, may generally be categorized as bacteria (the majority), members of domain Archaea, yeasts, and single-celled eukaryotes as well as various helminth parasites and viruses, the latter including viruses that infect the cellular microbiome organisms (e.g., bacteriophages, the viruses of bacteria).

>The leading sentence didn't make a whole lot of sense considering the project started six years before that report came out.

3. "The HMP includes the following goals:[11]

To develop a reference set of microbial genome sequences and to perform preliminary characterization of the human microbiome To explore the relationship between disease and changes in the human microbiome To develop new technologies and tools for computational analysis To establish a resource repository To study the ethical, legal, and social implications of human microbiome research"

>I didn't change the list format but I added a short lead and close to the section.

4. I added an entire section for phase two of the project.

Finally, I did not touch the other sections, but the clinical/pharmaceutical applications sections could use some attention, as they're both outdated. The achievements section is also outdated, and is very messy-looking, which makes it difficult to read.

Freeman.all (talk) 00:06, 16 April 2018 (UTC)