Metagenomics of the Human Body
Metagenomics of the Human Body introduces readers to the major findings from the human genome project and at the same time presents the crossover to the human metagenome/microbiome, which we are only starting to understand through the advent of newly emer
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Karen E. Nelson Editor
Metagenomics of the Human Body
Foreword by Jane L. Peterson and Susan Garges
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Editor Karen E. Nelson J. Craig Venter Institute 9704 Medical Center Drive Rockville, MD 20850, USA [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-7088-6 ISBN 978-1-4419-7089-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7089-3 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2010937845 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Cover illustration: © vege - Fotolia.com Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Karen E. Nelson would like to thank her colleagues with whom she has worked for several years, for their support and involvement in this publication. They have allowed her to appreciate the wonders of genomics. Special thanks are due to J. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith.
Foreword The Human Genome and the Human Microbiome
The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen, as a result of the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), the launch of an extraordinary new capability to make unprecedented progress in our understanding of human genetics and its role in disease. Now, at the end of that decade, scientific exploration is poised to add another new, perhaps just as revolutionary, capacity to our study of human biology and disease, the capability to study the human microbiome. The human microbiome, the complete set of microbes that live in and on the human body, is thought to play a major role in human health and disease, either directly through the expression of the microbial genes, or indirectly through interaction with human physiology, particularly with the immune system. As was the case for the HGP, the call for a human microbiome project came from the scientific community: Julian Davies noted in 2001 that, although completing the human genome sequence was a “crowning achievement” in biology, it would be an incomplete tool for understanding human biology until the synergistic activities between humans and the microbes living in and on them are understood (Davies, 2001). Relman and Falkow (2001), at about the same time, called for a “second human genome project” that “would entail a comprehensive inventory of microbial genes and genomes at the four major sites of microbial colonization in the human body
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