The Earth Microbiome Project is a proposed massively multidisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise is to examine microbial communities from their own perspective.

We propose to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples currently available from researchers across the globe. We will analyze 200,000 samples from these communities using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and amplicon sequencing to produce a global Gene Atlas describing protein space, environmental metabolic models for each biome, approximately 500,000 reconstructed microbial genomes, a global metabolic model, and a data-analysis portal for visualization of all information.