IBM Needs Your Help Studying the Human Microbiome

Humans have been to the Moon and the deepest part of the ocean, but when it comes to understanding what goes on in our own bodies, there's much that still needs to be explored. The human microbiome, for instance, is made of up of trillions of microscopic organisms that dictate everything from our gut health to certain chronic diseases. Now, Boston Magazine reports that IBM is attempting to study the human microbiome like it's never been studied before, and they're calling on the public to help with the effort.

The goal of the initiative, dubbed the Microbiome Immunity Project, is to decode the genomes of the many bacteria living inside the human body. Scientists know that the micobiome is linked to some diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. By analyzing the proteins these bacteria produce, researchers hope to get a better understanding of how these diseases happen and how to treat them at the microbial level.

To do this, scientists plan to study the proteins related to the 3 million unique bacterial genes of the human microbiome. For comparison, more than 20,000 genes were mapped for the Human Genome Project, and that undertaking lasted 13 years.

Technology has come a long way since that project was completed in 2003, but IBM will still need all the help they can get to make the Microbiome Immunity Project happen. In addition to collaborating with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California-San Diego, and the Flatiron Institute, IBM is calling on members of the public to donate their surplus computing power.

If you're interested in contributing to the citizen science project, you can sign up to join IBM's World Community Grid. From there, you'll be able to download a software program that detects when your computer has extra processing power to offer and uses it to run virtual experiments for the project. "Had World Community Grid not existed, we wouldn't have even contemplated this project," Rob Knight, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC-San Diego, said in a press statement. "By harnessing the efforts of volunteers, we can do something that exceeds the scale of what we have access to by a factor of thousands. For the first time, we're bringing a comprehensive structural biology picture to the whole microbiome, rather than solving structures one at a time in a piecemeal fashion."

IBM's software won't be able to access anything on your computer other than its processing power, and the company assures users that the system will be tested regularly for vulnerabilities. The crowdsourced computing program has been used to conduct research in areas such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, Zika, clean water, and renewable energy in the past. If IBM can get enough people to take part this time around, they plan to share their data publicly with other scientists working to study the microbiome's role in disease.