NIAID Microbiome Program

Main Areas of Focus

• To promote the exploration of the metaorganism in order to address questions of relevance to NIAID’s mission in both experimental and clinical settings
• To address research topics such as:
  • The role of microbiota in the development and function of the immune system
  • How dysregulation of host-microbiota interactions leads to chronic inflammatory diseases
  • How pathogens, their expressed genes, and their metabolites directly affect their own proliferation and/or immune signaling networks to exacerbate disease

Services

Microbiology

• Access to an in-house microbial collection
• Isolation and identification of microorganisms from diverse biological specimens 
• Activation, culturing, and long-term preservation of strains 
• Single strains or microbial consortia inoculums 
• Bacterial whole-genome sequencing

High-throughput sequencing

• Microbial nucleic acid extraction from diverse host sample types/sites  
• Immunoreactive microbe partitioning for downstream microbiome analysis  
• Sequencing library preparation  
• Short-read high-throughput sequencing using Illumina chemistry 
• Analysis of sequencing data (in collaboration with the NIAID Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Branch)

Gnotobiotic experimentation

• Design and assistance in gnotobiotic experimentation

How To Get Started

• Before beginning a project, a project proposal must be submitted to an oversight committee to be reviewed for scientific rationale and feasibility.