Microbiome: The New Frontier for Research

I was given the honour to speak at the 1st Microbial Metagenomics Conference and Workshop which was organised by and held at the Malaysia Genome Institute on the 24th and 25th October 2016. There were a good number international speakers in addition to the local ones. The biggest draw among the speakers is Professor Dr. Rita Colwell, who is a distinguished professor attached to the Centre for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, USA. She is also the Founder and Chief Global Science Officer for COSMOSID Inc. based in the USA.

Microbiome is the new ‘omics’ and it is simply defined as the collective genome of all the organisms present in or on the human body. There are trillions of microorganisms and the total genome content is 100x that of the human genome. The microbiome presides in our body ecosystem in a symbiotic manner hence any imbalance in the composition of microbiome may result in dysbiosis which in turn can trigger the pathogenesis of different diseases. There are already many diseases reported to be associated with the microbiome including cancers, diabetes, obesity and also neurodevelopmental disorders. Most of the evidence are association and many studies are being undertaken to prove causation.

The microbiome itself varies from on individual to another as it depends on not only our host genome and the existing normal flora but also on the exposure to the environment and our lifestyle and most importantly our diet. The microbiome profiles also varies from one geographical location to another which indirectly offers a lot of opportunities for our local researchers and scientists. bästa svenska casinon https://videospelautomater.com/svenska-casinon/

My lecture was titled ‘Microbiome in colorectal cancer and obesity: The Malaysian context’ and I presented the findings, for the first time at a national conference, of UMBI’s microbiome work in colorectal cancer which is funded through the Translational Research Grant Scheme under the Ministry of Higher Education. Our team discovered a few bacterial families which increased in abundance in patients with colorectal cancer compared to the controls, and interesting the profile were different from the data from the Caucasian and East Asian populations. The talk triggered a lot of discussions and there were a good number of researchers, notably Professor Dr. Rita Colwell herself, who showed interest to collaborate with UMBI.

Microbiome is indeed a new addition to the already massive amount of work in UMBI in genome, transcriptome, methylome, proteome and metabolome research. Big Data is already in UMBI, and we do hope that we will make a mark in microbiome research not only for UKM but also for the nation.

By: Professor Datuk Dr. A Rahman A Jamal