西亚试剂：Global solution

We think that an IMI could do a better job. The study of any microbiome demands myriad collaborations. These should involve basic and applied biologists, including those with expertise in microorganisms or in higher organisms; informaticians and mathematicians, who can develop methods that extract information from the mountains of sequence data; and chemists, physicists and engineers. Physical scientists are needed to find new ways to measure and manipulate the compounds that microbes produce and exchange with their biotic and abiotic surroundings.

An IMI would be pivotal in bringing together all these experts and allow scientists to move beyond cataloguing, which has characterized much of microbiome work so far. And, it would be limiting to recruit such a vast range of intellectual, scientific and technological expertise from one country alone.

IMI participants could use comparative approaches to reveal the factors that underlie the structure and function of microbiomes on local to global scales. An example of the potential of comparative approaches comes from studies of Native Americans8 and African hunter-gatherers9. It seems that these groups have a much higher diversity of microbial partners (a known correlate with better health) than do people living in industrialized societies.

By pooling data from scientists from around the world, an IMI would generate much more knowledge than could one country alone. Thanks to the falling costs of sequencing machines, individual labs will probably soon produce more data than the conventional large sequencing centres, such as the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California. Yet for any one laboratory, sample sizes might be restricted, and researchers might have only limited bioinformatics capacity.

An IMI could encourage the integration of data across institutions and nations. This is especially important for countries that may not have the funds to invest in their own global-scale projects. For example, cloud-computing platforms would allow people to upload and analyse sequencing data as soon as they are available. The IMI could also control and organize access to metadata (the associated host disease phenotype data, for a human gut microbiota sample, for instance) without which meaningful interpretation of the data is not possible. This could also be a way to safeguard the intellectual property of researchers, funding bodies and nations.

Most importantly, an IMI is essential when it comes to solving problems that affect the biosphere. Although processes involving microbiomes vary from place to place, the impact of such processes can often be felt globally. Potent greenhouse gases, such as nitrogen oxides produced by denitrifying bacteria in overfertilized Chinese farming lands or methane released by archaea in the millions of ruminant animals in Australia and New Zealand, may have contributed substantially to global warming. Billions of tonnes of human-made toxic chemicals have overwhelmed the degrading and recycling capacity of microbiomes. And the imprudent use of antibiotics has contributed worldwide to epidemics of chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and cancer. The solutions to some of these problems may come out of local research, but an IMI is essential for ensuring that comparable data are produced from efforts throughout the international scientific community.

We do not have all the answers when it comes to designing an IMI. In fact, we think that the first step to launching such a project should be the bringing together of leading microbiome researchers from across the globe to discuss its goals. However, even at this stage, some elements seem crucial (see ‘Four functions of an International Microbiome Initiative’).

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