Perspective Bioinformatics for the Human Microbiome Project

Microbes inhabit virtually all sites of the human body, yet we know very little about the role they play in our health. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in studying human-associated microbial communities, particularly since microbial dysbioses have now been implicated in a number of human diseases [1–3]. Dysbio-sis, the disruption of the normal microbial community structure, however, is impos-sible to define without first establishing what ‘‘normal microbial community struc-ture’ ’ means within the healthy human microbiome. Recent advances in sequenc-ing technologies have made it feasible to perform large-scale studies of microbial communities, providing the tools necessary to begin to address this question [4,5]. This led to the implementation of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) in 2007, an initiative funded by the Nationa