Useful Sites

Some interesting news pieces about the human microbiome that you and your students may find interesting. These articles serve as a good introduction to the human microbiome:

• "Me, myself, us", The Economist: "Looking at human beings as ecosystems that contain many collaborating and competing species could change the practice of medicine"
• "Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden", Carl Zimmer, The New York Times: "For a century, doctors have waged war against bacteria, using antibiotics as their weapons. But that relationship is changing as scientists become more familiar with the 100 trillion microbes that call us home — collectively known as the microbiome."
• "Germs are Us", Michael Specter, The New Yorker: "Bacteria make us sick. Do they also keep us alive?"
• "Some of My Best Friends are Germs", Michael Pollan, The New York Times: "I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder."
• "Searching for a 'Healthy' Microbiome", Ed Yong, PBS.org: "In 2008, a team of doctors and scientists ventured deep within Venezuelan jungle and collected stool samples from twelve people who, until then, had never met anyone outside their own cultural group." 

Below is a list of some other websites about the human microbiome that may be useful to you and your students: 

• http://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/index: NIH Human Microbiome Project Website
• http://www.ploscollections.org/article/browseIssue.action?issue=info:doi/10.1371/issue.pcol.v01.i13: PLOS, "The Human Microbiome Project Collection" - an open access collection of scientific research papers and review articles on the Human Microbiome Project
  
• http://www.genome.gov/10001772: The Human Genome Project 
  
• http://ubiome.com/: uBiome- sequencing your own microbiome 
  
• http://www.npr.org/series/218987212/microbiome: NPR series - "The Human Microbiome: Guts and Glory"
  
• http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microbiome-graphic-explore-human-microbiome/: Interactive Human Microbiome map
  
• http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/microbiome: More general educational site about the human microbiome from the University of Utah