Our Ecosystem
The Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics has already launched new initiatives such as the Global Microbiome Conservancy, Bio-ML Strain Collection and Microbial Omics Core. We also closely collaborate with the non-profit stool bank, OpenBiome, on our clinical studies.
Global Microbiome Conservancy
Industrialization is associated with profound changes to the human microbiome, largely due to low-fiber, highly processed diets, frequent antibiotic use, sedentary lifestyles, and other factors associated with urban living. The Global Microbiome Conservancy initiative, which was founded at MIT with catalytic seed funding from CMIT, aims to study and conserve microbiomes from underrepresented global populations, with a focus on communities leading non-industrialized lifestyles. To date, the initiative has collected samples from over 40 communities, and built a library of ten thousand genome-sequenced bacterial isolates, in collaboration with a consortium of more than 70 researchers around the world. The initiative spun out of MIT and is currently housed at Kiel University in Germany. For more information, please visit microbiomeconservancy.org.
OpenBiome
OpenBiome is a non-profit stool bank that was founded in 2012 by a team of doctors, scientists and public health advocates. OpenBiome provides safe fecal microbiota transplantation material (FMT) from extensively-screened donors and seeks to eliminate barriers for patients to receive FMT to treat recurrent C. difficile infection.
OpenBiome also supports translational microbiome research and works closely with CMIT on many of our clinical collaborations.
For more information visit https://www.openbiome.org/
Microbial Omics Core
The Microbial Omics Core is CMIT’s core facility at the Broad Institute. MOC prepares samples from our clinical collaborations and research projects for data generation on the Broad sequencing and metabolite profiling platforms.
For more information about MOC please see their website or contact humanmicrobiome@mit.edu.
The Broad Institute-OpenBiome Microbiome Library
The Broad Institute-OpenBiome Microbiome Library is a collection of more than 7,000 strains of bacteria isolated from the gut microbiome of healthy adults.