History

History in a nutshell

To know how this adventure of the microbiology research all started, it is good to know a little bit about its history. When we think about microbiology, an important person pops up in our mind, you probably already heard of him; our compatriot Antony van Leeuwenhoek. This very important person was a Dutch microscope lens maker, who was the first man who described microscopic animalculs in dental plaque, in 1676. After his discovery, further research largely focused on culture-based studies of individual microbial species, with the emphasis to understand the microbial pathogenesis (Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, etc.) [1]. Because the importance of the microbiome became more and more clear, new molecular methods for microbial detection developed over the last 30 years. These new methods provided the knowledge about the existence of a vast diversity of microbes that inhabit the gut, demonstrated that these organisms live in communities instead of existing in isolation and the results of these methods gave us a more comprehensive view of the human body as a series of ecosystems, each with his own particular microbial composition [1].

The Human Microbiome Project

Much has changed since these developments and many research has been done. Modern microbiome research started with Craig Venter in 2004. Mr. Venter was the first one to sequence the human genome and the first to create an artificial bacterial chromosome. In 2008 he started the human microbiome project, where they look at the collection of all the microorganisms living in association with the human body. Since 2012 there are 1000+ microbiome publications per year, this shows us that the research into the microbiome is far from finished.

                                                                                                                               Written by Mirre Verstegen
                                                                                                                                                         Posted on 8 oct 2018

[1] Fujimura, KE. Lynch, SV. Microbiota in allergy and asthma and the emerging relationship with the gut microbiome. In: Cell
     HostMicrobiome. Cell Host Microbe. 2015 May 13;17(5):592-602. doi: 10.1016/j.chom.2015.04.007