Bioinformatics support for the Tubiom community gut microbiome project

Abstract

The Tübiom project is a community-based project aimed at constructing a large, representative reference database of human gut microbiome profiles. The goal is to collect 10 000 profiles, along with detailed metadata on each participants health and lifestyle. All samples will be processed using identical sequencing and analysis protocols to ensure comparability. The project has four technical components: sequencing, sequence analysis, data storage and visualization. The project website http://www.tuebiom.de allows interested people to learn about the project, order a sampling kit and fill-in the metadata questionnaire. Once a sample as been submitted and processed, a participant can explore the taxonomic profile of their gut microbiome and compare it to the typical profile of different comparison groups.This community-based project also hopes to engage participants in science-propagation, spread knowledge about the gut microbiome and the importance of this area of research. Here we provide a brief introduction to the Tübiom project and describe the bioinformatics framework that we have developed for it.