Center for Common Disease Genomics [CCDG] - Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD): Global Microbiome Conservancy Host Exomes. Center for Common Disease Genomics [CCDG] - Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD): Global Microbiome Conservancy Host Exomes

The human body is a complex ecosystem, hosting tens of billions of bacteria, primarily in the gut. This community, known as the 'gut microbiome', is vital to human health, affecting functions ranging from metabolism, immunity, and development, to behavior. Conversely, reduced microbiome diversity and other imbalances of the gut community (dysbiosis) are associated with many diseases of the industrialized world, such as metabolic syndrome, asthma, and inflammatory bowel diseases among others. Microbiome-based interventions thus hold the potential to revolutionize our understanding of, and therapeutic approaches to, many aspects of human health and disease. Despite many advances, current understanding of the human microbiome is largely limited to majority ethnic groups in industrialized nations, and does not reflect the full diversity of human commensal microbiota. In addition to the scientific ramifications of minority underrepresentation, there are significant... (for more see dbGaP study page.)