• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

There Will Soon Be A Doomsday Vault For Human Poop

January 9, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Scientists are looking to create a vault that will hold samples of human poop from around the world. Through building this “doomsday vault,” they hope to protect the world’s microbial diversity and foster a deeper understanding of how global health is influenced by the trillions of bacteria living inside the human gut.

Dubbed the Microbiota Vault, the project says it takes direct inspiration from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility in the Norwegian Arctic that safeguards the global diversity of food crop seeds. It’s the brainchild of a team of microbe-obsessed researchers based at the University of Basel, the University of Lausanne, ETH Zürich, and Rutgers University.

Advertisement

Outlining their plan in a 2018 paper published in Science, the team explains how the rise of many diseases and conditions in recent decades – including obesity, diabetes, asthma, allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, and autism – can be linked to changes in the human microbiome caused by urbanization, industrialization, and globalization. 

Our changing diet, overuse of antibiotics, and squeaky-clean approach to hygiene have affected the diversity of microbes living in the guts of many people. If we take a look at the poop of hunter-gatherers who live in remote parts of the world, we see a far more diverse and robust gut microbiome. 

Worldwide, however, this diversity is coming increasingly under threat, and scientists argue this is having an impact on our immune systems and global health.  

Advertisement

While science is just starting to get to grips with the profound importance of the human microbiome, there is still a lot left to learn – and a huge amount of knowledge that risks being lost forever. 

“Metagenomic analyses had previously shown that ~80 percent of the bacteria inhabiting the human body are unknown, prompting the metaphor of ‘microbial dark matter.’ Such unknown diversity also extends to archaea, microbial eukaryotes, and viruses. Taken together, this means that there is a danger of irrevocably losing valuable information and opportunity, at a time when science has just started understanding the health relevance and potential of our microbial environment and the microbiome,” the researchers explain in a 2020 feasibility study. 

They argue that the solution is a biobank to preserve the world’s microbial diversity and provide researchers with the opportunity to master the science of human microbiomes.

Advertisement

In 2021, the Microbiota Vault initiative sparked the Launch Phase of the project, a two-year period to kick-start the installation of a biobank somewhere in Switzerland. Their aim is to eventually start collecting a diverse range of microbial samples, which they say will primarily come from human poop, and preserve them either through cryogenic deep freezing or freeze-drying. 

There is already a rich landscape of existing projects hoping to achieve similar things. One example, called the Global Microbiome Conservancy, is already in action and has collected over 1,000 microbiome samples from people living across America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. 

The Microbiota Vault says they wish to build on this work and become part of a “powerful global framework” to strengthen human microbiome research.

Advertisement

“A global repository of human-associated microbes should back up existing research collections, similar in principle to the inspiring example of the Seed Vault established in the permafrost of Svalbard Island in Norway to preserve the natural biodiversity of plants. We owe future generations the microbes that colonized our ancestors for at least 200,000  years of human evolution,” the researchers explained in the 2018 study. 

“We must begin before it is too late,” they conclude.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Wall St set to open flat on fears over slowing economic growth
  2. U.N. concerned at U.S. pushbacks of migrants who may need asylum
  3. Instacart shopper activist group asks customers to delete the app until demands for better conditions are met
  4. Italy’s PD leader Letta seen winning Siena parliamentary seat – early count

Source Link: There Will Soon Be A Doomsday Vault For Human Poop

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • 9,000-Year-Old Dog Poop Reveals Siberian Sled Dogs Ate Polar Bears
  • Watch The Highest Resolution View Of A Solar Flare Down To An Incredible 21 Kilometers
  • Jupiter’s Mysterious Core: Science’s Best Explanation For How It Formed Doesn’t Work After All
  • The Largest Ancient Whale Graveyard In The World Is In The Middle Of… A Desert?
  • Some Languages Don’t Clearly Express A Sense Of The Future, And It Skews The Way We See Reality
  • Rare White Kiwi Seen Scampering Back To Its Burrow In Broad Daylight In New Zealand
  • What Is Osmotic Power? Japan’s New Renewable Energy Plant Goes Live
  • The “Wow!” Signal Was Likely From An Extraterrestrial Source, And More Powerful Than We Thought
  • The Greatest Prank Ever Pulled In Space Really Fooled NASA’s Mission Control
  • Why Does Seafood Glow In The Dark? This Curious Phenomenon Has A Teeny Tiny Explanation
  • In 1973, A Handful Of People Witnessed A Whopping 74-Minute Total Eclipse
  • Does Putting A Metal Spoon In Champagne Really Keep It Fizzy?
  • Why Scientists Are Going Over A Kilometer Underground In The Search For Alien Life
  • The Deadliest Animal In The US Isn’t What You’d Expect
  • Humpback Whale Flippers Let Them Move “Like Underwater Fighter Pilots” To Make Unique Bubble Nets
  • The Only Place On Earth Where You (Yes, You) Can Search For Diamonds – And Keep What You Find
  • Bizarre Gravitational Collisions Reveal Hints Of First Black Hole Throuple
  • Newly Discovered Dinosaur’s “Sail-Like” Structure Along Its Back May Have Attracted Mates
  • What Are Lagrange Points, And Why Are They Important?
  • Fish Left The Ocean 10 Million Years Earlier Than Thought, JWST Spots Tiny New Moon Just Outside Uranus’s Rings, And Much More This Week
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version