Earth Microbiome Project
The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) is an initiative founded by Janet Jansson, Jack Gilbert and Rob Knight in 2010 to collect natural samples and to analyze the microbial community around the globe.
| Formation | 2010 |
|---|---|
| Website | https://earthmicrobiome.org/ |
Microbes are highly abundant, diverse, and important in ecology. Yet as of 2010, it was estimated that the total global environmental DNA sequencing effort had produced less than 1 percent of the total DNA found in a liter of seawater or a gram of soil, and the specific interactions between microbes are largely unknown.
The EMP aims to process as many as 200,000 samples in different biomes, generating a complete database of microbes on earth to characterize environments and ecosystems by microbial composition and interaction. New ecological and evolutionary theories can be proposed and tested using these data.