The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) is a massively collaborative effort to characterize microbial life on this planet. We use DNA sequencing and mass spectrometry of crowd-sourced samples to understand patterns in microbial ecology across the biomes and habitats of our planet. The EMP is a comprehensive example of open science, leveraging a collaborative network of 500+ investigators, supporting pre-publication data sharing, and crowdsourcing data analysis to enable universal principles to be explored. The standardized collection, curation, and analysis are enabling a robust interpretation of ecological trends. The Earth Microbiome Project Multi-omics component (EMP500) involves amplicon and shotgun metagenomic sequencing and metabolomic profiling of over five hundred microbial communities from diverse environments on our planet. We developed new protocols for shotgun metagenomic sequencing and assembly, with the goal of applying this workflow to a range of environmental samples, combined with metabolomic profiling. 16S, 18S, and ITS amplicon sequencing was done in addition. We acquired a set of >500 fresh environmental samples across a range of habitats, with the help of the EMP network of collaborators. A biobank of frozen aliquots for all samples is maintained at UCSD (soil samples stored at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) for future methods testing and analysis.
The John Templeton Foundation (Grant ID 44000, Convergent Evolution of the Vertebrate Microbiome).|The W. M. Keck Foundation (DT061413).|U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357 (ANL).|The Australian Research Council.|The Tula Foundation.|The Samuel Lawrence Foundation.