The National Institutes of Health has launched the first phase of the Microbiome Cloud Project, or MCP, a collaborative project with Amazon Web Services that aims to improve access to and analysis of data from the Human Microbiome Project.
In this phase, five terabytes of genetic information from human microbes have been made available on the cloud. This makes it easy for researchers to access and analyze the data online without having to worry about time-consuming downloads or compute infrastructure. Mining HMP data could help researchers understand the role of the microbiota in health and disease as well as uncover new targets for drugs and vaccines.
The MCP development team, which is led by researchers at the University Of Maryland School Of Medicine, has begun working on the next phase of the MCP, which will add more datasets, analysis tools, and supporting documentation. The researchers are funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Human Genome Research Institute.