The EMP was founded in 2010 as a massive crowd-sourced effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise was to examine microbial communities from their own perspective. Hence we proposed to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples drawn from researchers across the globe. We set out to analyze 200,000 samples from these communities using amplicon sequencing, metagenomics, and metabolomics to produce a global Gene Atlas describing protein space, environmental metabolic models for each biome, approximately 500,000 reconstructed microbial genomes, a global metabolic model, and a data-analysis portal for visualization of processed information.

Classification: microbe

Data type: genome sequencing