Dear World Community Grid volunteers,

Thank you for your heroic contributions to the Microbiome Immunity Project! Your efforts have allowed us to predict the structures of more than 330,000 proteins contained in the microbiome, dramatically improving our understanding of the functions contained in this incredibly complex community that inhabits all our bodies and underpins many aspects of our health and disease.

With the recent advent of new protein folding techniques based on AI and deep learning, it is now possible to compute these structures hundreds of times faster than when we started the project. We are therefore drawing the project to a close at the end of June, bridging results to new, faster techniques that can be performed on traditional high-performance compute clusters and do not need the power of World Community Grid.

What this means is that your volunteer effort has transformed the accessibility of structural biology for microbiome researchers worldwide, allowing these techniques to be incorporated into the thousands of microbiome projects, targeting diseases ranging from type-1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease to cancer to neurological disease, and being conducted around the world.

We already have one scientific article published resulting from the techniques developed from this project, with a second on the way that will apply those protocols to the results that you generated. We will keep you updated on more findings as we publish them.

Thank you again for your impressive contributions to MIP!


Best,
The Microbiome Immunity Project team