Earth Microbiome project (EMP)

there are a group of scientists that are trying to use 16s and metagenomic analysis across all of Earth's ecosystems. The goal is an incredible number of environmental samples (10K-200K depending on the source of the info) expected to generate 15 trillion base pairs of DNA sequence information.

http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/

This is an incredible project that should yield some pretty fantastic insights into microbial life on this planet

For current students: The importance of this project relates back to the fact that so many (an estimated 99%) of the bacteria out there are not easily cultured by our standard techniques, therefore we seldom detect that they are there and in many instance, we have never detected them. By analyzing the DNA we can detect their presence and estimate their diversity by comparing the DNA to microbes that we have already worked with. Expect this project to reveal many new lineages of bacterial life!