On March 4, "A human gut microbial gene catalogue established by metagenomic sequencing" was published as the cover story of Nature, an international core scientific journal. The paper is jointly composed by LI Junhua and XIE Yinlong, the named authors who are studying Innovative Program of Human Genome Sciences, and SCUT which is the seventh unit to complete the project, together with Shenzhen Genomics Research Institute, the chief project undertaker. After two publishes in Science and Nature Biotechnology in 2009, it is the third time that students of Innovative Program have got their paper published in renowned international core scientific journals.

 

This groundbreaking research is part of MetaHIT, a project financed by EU Seventh Framework Program (FP7). Through the establishment of the human gut microbial gene catalogue, the research focuses on and scientifically illustrates the subtle relation between microbiome and human health, which makes some contributions to disease preventing and monitoring, such as obesity, enteritis and diabetes caused by human gut bacteria, and helps pave the way for the age of personalized medicine based on gut microbial gene catalogue.

 

The named authors of the paper, LI Junhua and XIE Yinlong are students of Grade 2006 from School of Software Engineering, SCUT, and both joined the first Human Genome Sciences Innovative Program which is jointly established by the University and Shenzhen Genomics Research Institute. In the research, Li is mainly responsible for the verification of consistency between next-generation Solexa and traditional Sanger, and the formulation of the method to verify the completeness of human gut microbial gene catalogue. While Xie mainly works on the genome annotation, and established a complete human gut microbial gene catalogue with other team members.