[Excerpt from Harvard Chan News]
BIOM-Mass, led by Eric Rimm, professor of epidemiology and nutrition and Wendy Garrett, professor of immunology and infectious diseases, will create the world’s most comprehensive human microbiome specimen collection, using samples from more than 25,000 individuals from the School-based Nurses’ Health Study II and other long-running cohort studies. The researchers will catalog the microbial populations across multiple body sites from study participants, combining that data with individual lifestyle, health, and genetic information that has already been collected. The facility will also include a data portal, which will enable scientists to access an unprecedented volume of information on the microbiome…[Read full article.]