Inside norway doomsday vault3/27/2023 Long-term preservation presents different challenges than live samples. Local medical teams or anthropologists will also be familiar with an area’s unique challenges, like whether electricity is reliable enough to keep samples cool. The first 10-day course was scheduled for Peru, but that was pre-COVID-19. “This is also anthropology and ethics.” By connecting with local experts, foreign universities would potentially have an easier time figuring out laws and permits, as well as communicating with indigenous groups. “This is more than microbiology,” said Dominguez-Bello. The plan is to partner with universities in various countries to teach local scientists about the microbiome, why such collections are needed, and how to collect and preserve samples. “And the way we are planning to do it is through education,” said Dominguez-Bello. The vault’s participants have started making contacts in several countries, including Peru, Bolivia and Indonesia. One day, the vault could potentially hold hundreds of thousands of samples, but the pilot program would start with a few thousand. These samples could be used for research and collaboration, with extra material prepared for long-term storage in the vault. “The local collections are extremely important because the local collections are the live collections,” said Dominguez-Bello. Another goal is to encourage the creation of more local collections, particularly of indigenous groups. One major step will be persuading the stewards of such banks to hand over samples for backup storage. There already exist a number of microorganism collections all over the world, including the American Gut Project, Asia Microbiota Bank, and the Million Microbiome of Humans Project. The next steps are to form several committees dedicated to outreach and philanthropy finalize the vault’s location, funding, technical issues improve education and international relations and other areas. In mid-June of this year, a feasibility study from two independent agencies, EvalueScience and Advocacy, found the proposal to be “of high significance and potential.” Dominguez-Bello sees the study’s completion as moving the project from the gestational to newborn phase. “I lived, in my own skin, how vulnerable our individual collections are,” she said.Īfter contacting the researchers involved in the Svalbard project, Dominguez-Bello started assembling scientists in her own field to look at the potential of creating a microbiota vault. She and her team had to go into the lab with headlamps to rescue the samples. In 2012, she moved to New York University, where, after only a month, Hurricane Sandy hit. Having worked in both her native Venezuela and Puerto Rico, Dominguez-Bello knows firsthand the hazards that political unrest and climate threats pose to sample collections. “By the time we know better– if we don’t preserve now, we won’t have it,” she said. Yet Dominguez-Bello is worries that as microbiota research matures, its practitioners might be losing out on valuable data from indigenous populations with more traditional lifestyles and diverse microbiota. While studies have shown that such differences exist, it’s not yet fully clear that these alterations are driving increases in chronic conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease. Diet, pollution, medication, sanitation, and other markers of urban environments could manifest these changes in the microorganisms. Some researchers are studying the ways in which the microbiota of people in industrial areas differ from those in rural or remote areas. Blaser on the 'Microbiota Vault'-Initiative
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