<p>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 translational and ethical implications as well: first, failing to capture the full diversity of healthy human microbiota may limit our ability to understand and generate effective therapeutics for many microbiome-associated diseases. Second, underrepresented groups are less likely to benefit from microbiome-based medical advances tailored to well-studied populations, propagating healthcare inequities. </p><div><p></p>
</div><div><br></div><div>Human gut microbial diversity is diminishing around the globe, due to the spread of industrialized diets and lifestyles, which are associated with reduced microbiome biodiversity. The Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMbC) is a non-profit collaboration between scientists and communities around the world that aims to 1) preserve the full biodiversity of the human gut microbiome, 2) characterize its evolution across populations and host lifestyles and 3) investigate its interactions with the human host. We are collecting gut microbiome and human DNA samples from diverse populations around the world, from isolated groups to urbanized populations, to culture and study this essential biodiversity and to preserve it in a living "seed bank" of bacterial isolates as a long-term safeguard against future extinctions.
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</div><div><br></div><div>Human genetic data for the samples sequenced in this study can be found in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?study_id=phs002205">phs002205</a>.</div><div><br></div>

Global Microbiome Conservancy Sequence Data