Local environmental heterogeneity and impacts on human health and wellness

Studies have shown that in the developed world, there are less diverse microbiomes in humans, and these may be related to modern diseases that were initially not thought to be related to the microbiome. This brings about how diet can modulate how the genes are able to express, including the diseases that individuals are predisposed to. Prof. Andrew Bartko introduces The Microsetta Inititative (TMI), which advances the understanding of the relationship between the human microbiome and environmental factors through personalized microbiome sequences. This allows researchers to analyze the sequence against diet, lifestyle, microbiome, gut health and medical conditions, while having a database which may be used for further studies. He also discussed the  Microbe Disease Co-relation (Micro Disco) tool, which employs natural language processing to search taxonomy and disease libraries. This tool searches for literature related to specific microbes and the disease to determine if there is evidence of a correlation.