Human Microbiome Engineering: The Future and Beyond

Human Microbiome

Humans are almost identical in their genetic pattern, but the slight differences in our DNA lead to remarkable phenotypic variation among the human population. There are a variety of microbial communities and their genes (microbiomes) in the human body that play an essential role in human health and disease. The microbes inhabiting our bodies is quite a bit more variable, with only a third of i...

The Human Microbiome and Infectious Diseases: Beyond Koch

A century after Robert Koch linked individual cultured microbes to specific diseases (Koch's postulates), it has become increasingly apparent that the complex community of microorganisms associated with the human body plays a key role in health and disease. The National Institutes of Health recently announced the Human Microbiome Project as part of the NIH Roadmap for medical research, with a p...

Probabilistic design: The future of rock engineering

A brief background to the development of the rock engineering design process is given, showing that since the development of the science of mathematics, deterministic methods have been used to perform various calculations. The variability of rock properties and support characteristics have always been known. However, they were not explicitly used in design but compensated for by the use of a sa...

The Human Microbiome Project: Beginning and Future Status

In 1884 Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler published Koch’s Postulates defining our historical understanding of the relationship between an organism and infection: one organism: one disease. In the last decade with research on the microbial community living on and in humans, a new concept of microbial diseases has emerged; that is, alterations of the microbial community can lead to disease incl...

Membrane Engineering: Future Perspectives