Group leaders: Dr. Sonia Michail & Dr. Brent Polk
Project summary:
The gut microbiome is recognized as an important organ that impacts health and disease. It is an area of intense research that has been identified by the NIH as high priority. Currently the NIH has over 300 active RFAs that solicit applications to understand the microbiome across intervention and the focus of many of the national and international meetings has recently become the microbiome. The challenge of studying the gut microbiome stems from its complex bioinformatics requirement that many clinicians are unable to perform on their own and the experts in bioinformatics, proteomics, metagenomics, etc., may not have the clinical knowledge and expertise to understand the implications of the gut microbiome in health and disease. Therefore, it is imperative to build teams to tackle and understand the gut microbiome in a multidisciplinary approach.