The Atlantic magazine recently profiled the Hospital Microbiome Project, led by UChicago Biosciences professor Jack Gilbert. Launched in 2012, the project collected extensive data from a then-new University of Chicago Hospital building before it began admitting patients in 2013, swabbing virtually every corner of the hospital for microoorganisms. The researchers returned throughout the year, eventually collecting over 12,000 microbiota samples.
“There are many unexplained diseases that occur in hospitals—sepsis, infections—and although we can identify a bacterium most associated with those events, we still fail to understand the specifics of the transfer of organisms in the hospital,” Gilbert says.
The goal of this project is to ultimately gain a solid understanding of how microbe communities are created, and their impact on a person's health.
Read the full story at The Atlantic.