|
The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) is an initiative to collect natural samples and to analyze the microbial community around the globe. Microbes are highly abundant, diverse, and have an important role in the ecological system. There are an estimated 1.3 x 1028 archaeal cells, 3.1 x 1028 bacterial cells, and 1 x 1030 virus particles in the ocean. The bacterial diversity, a measure of the number of ''types'' of bacteria in a community, is estimated to be about 160 for a mL of ocean water, 6,400–38,000 for a g of soil, and 70 for a mL of sewage works.〔 Yet , it was estimated that the total global environmental DNA sequencing effort had produced less than 1 percent of the total DNA found in a liter of seawater or a gram of soil, and the specific interactions between microbes are largely unknown. The EMP aims to process as many as 200,000 samples in different biomes, generating a complete database of microbes on earth to characterize environments and ecosystems by microbial composition and interaction. Using these data, new ecological and evolutionary theories can be proposed and tested. ==Goals== The primary goal of EMP is to survey microbial composition in many environments across the planet, across time as well as space, using a standard set of protocols. The development of standardized protocols is vital, because variations in sample extraction, amplification, sequencing and analysis introduce biases that would invalidate comparisons of microbial community structure. Another important goal is to determine how reconstruction of microbial communities is affected by analytic biases. The rate of technological advance is rapid, and it is necessary to understand how data using updated protocols will compare with data collected using earlier techniques. Information from this project will be archived in a database to facilitate analysis. Other outputs will include a global atlas of protein function and a catalog of reassembled genomes classified by their taxonomic distributions.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Earth Microbiome Project」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|