It’s abundantly clear that microörganisms play an essential role in maintaining the health of humans, animals, and plants. But how exactly they pull this off is still mostly a mystery—one that the White House hopes to help solve by way of a new microbiome research initiative.
Specifically, the White House is proposing a federal investment of $121 million toward microbiome research, to be divided among the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Agriculture. The high-level goal is to better understand the “behavior” of microbiomes so that we can learn how to maintain or restore the function of healthy ones. Much of the work will focus on developing new scientific tools for teasing out the details of how microbiomes work, and how that varies depending on the particular ecosystem…
Source: MIT Tech Review