Harnessing the power of microbiomes

Microbiomes — omnipresent, complex communities of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and viruses — have major impacts on the health of humans, animals, plants and environments. Learning how they function, and how to predict the effects of changing or deploying microbiomes at a large scale, will open up avenues to many new applications in agriculture, healthcare and the food industry.

The Holomicrobiome Initiative aims to establish the Holomicrobiome Institute, a public/private institute that will focus growing microbiome research in the Netherlands on mapping the interactions within and between microbiomes in domains that are now often studied separately: people, animals, plants, soil, and water.