The Human Microbiome requires insights into people’s lifestyles
The human gut microbiome is the community of microbes (and their gene products) interacting in the human gut. However, research has only scratched the surface of under- standing the microbiome and using it to improve our well- being. The American Gut Project (AGP) is the world's largest crowdfunded citizen science project. AGP participants contribute their samples for bacterial marker gene sequencing and analysis. Participants then receive a summary of their results with all their raw data. Anony- mized data is publically available. AGP seeks to build a comprehensive map of the human microbiome, and identify its healthy and unhealthy components.
Learn, Ask, Answer!: People hold the key to understanding the gut microbiome
The structure of the human microbiome is influenced by many factors, including age, genetics, diet, and xenobiotic and antibiotic use. The gut microbiome in particular plays an important role in metabolism and immune system development, and some microbiome dysbioses have been associated with diseases such as obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, type I and type II diabetes, autism, multiple sclerosis, and malnutrition. The human microbiome is impossible to understand without information about its host and many influence factors remain unknown. Teaching people about the gut microbiome and having them guess associations between the microbiome and health and dis- ease states can potentially accelerate the process of discov- ering links between diet, disease, and lifestyle factors and the gut microbiome.
Gut Instinct System
Gut Instinct is a collaborative system with a dual objective: help people learn about the gut microbiome, and catalyze the creation of a list of factors that may be associated with gut microbiome differences. People anonymously post questions about lifestyle and health for peers to answer. These questions and discussions provide researchers cues to build associations between lifestyle and the microbiome. Gut Instinct is a web application built with Meteor (http://www.meteor.com). The front-end uses Angular (http://www.angularjs.org) and is stylized with Materialize (http://www.materialize.css). It is BSD open source at http://gutinstinct.herokuapp.com.
Results and Publications
Gut Instinct is currently under deployment. Stay tuned to see more results!
Here are our preliminary papers:Creating Scientific Theories with Online Learners. Vineet Pandey, Amnon Amir, Justine Debelius, Embriette R. Hyde, Tomasz Kosciolek, Rob Knight, Scott Klemmer. CHI 2017. pdf
Integrating citizen science with online learning to ask better questions.
Vineet Pandey, Scott Klemmer, Amnon Amir, Justine Debelius, Embriette R. Hyde, Tomasz Kosciolek, Rob Knight. Demo. HCOMP 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05763
Our Team
UC San Diego - Knight Lab
UC San Diego - The Design Lab
Alumni
"Everything is designed, but some things are designed well."
What Gut Instinct Users say?
Gut Instinct data use
How does Gut Instinct use my data?
Questions created by you: Gut microbiome scientists will look at your questions to create novel hypotheses that can possibly be tested in their experiments. If you provide your American Gut ID to Gut Instinct, your questions will be used to draw correlations between your lifestyle and your gut microbiome
Options added by you or your response to other questions:: Same as above
Email: Gut Instinct will send you notifications and newsletter to help you identify useful questions. Your email will not be shared with anyone and it will be securely stored on our cloud database
Location: Gut Instinct will attempt to draw correlations among people's response to questions and their location, and their location and gut microbiome data (if you provide your American Gut id)
American Gut ID : Gut Instinct will use your American Gut ID to draw correlations between your gut microbiome data and your questions and answers on above questions. Your American Gut id will not be shared with anyone and it will be securely stored on our cloud database
Please shoot us an email with any questions or requests to delete your data at vipandey-AT-ucsd.edu. We will respond within 48 hours.