NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – uBiome today announced it has raised more than $120,000 in crowdfunding.
The citizen science effort to map the human microbiome raised the amount with more than 1,000 participants, it said, and exceeded its goal of $100,000.
The effort was launched last month by a team of researchers affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco. It is billed as "the world's first effort to map the human microbiome with citizen science," and will initially seek to sequence the microbiomes of 1,000 individuals, who will receive their results and links to relevant scientific studies, as GenomeWeb Daily News' sister publication Clinical Sequencing News reported.
"Moving forward, we hope to sequence tens of thousands and engage physicians and other scientists in our research," uBiome Co-founder William Ludington said in a statement. "We also want to allow our citizen scientists to begin asking their own research questions by submitting confidential questionnaires to our user groups."