On Dec. 31 2010, In a meeting report from the Terabase Metagenomics Workshop in Snowbird, Utah, the Vision of an “Earth Microbiome Project” was published in “Standards in Genomic Sciences.”

The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) is a massively collaborative effort to characterize microbial life on this planet. Researchers use DNA sequencing and mass spectrometry of crowd-sourced samples to understand patterns in microbial ecology across the biomes and habitats of our planet.