In this week’s issue of Nature, an international team led by Junjie Qin of the BGI in Shenzhen, China, reports their metagenomic sequencing and analysis of the human gut microbiome. Using an Illumina platform, the team sequenced and assembled 3.3 million non-redundant microbial genes from fecal samples of 124 European individuals, representing a gene set about “150 times larger than the human gene complement.” Qin et al.