US government and private investors team up for proposed half-a-billion-dollar effort to study the vast, and mostly invisible, array of microbes that thrive in the human body and across ecosystems. The US $121-million National Microbiome Initiative (NMI) will attempt to map and investigate these collections of microorganisms over the next two years, with help from multiple federal agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said today. Private investors will contribute another $400 million to the effort over several years. Among them is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which will spend 100 million dollars over four years on nutrition and pest control programmes in developing countries, and several research institutions that will examine microbes' role in subjects such as cancer therapeutics and marine microbiology. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/white-house-goes-big-on-microbiome-research/
