Photo Credit: Stool Photo Credit: GMbC team processing stool samples in an improvised laboratory by a Bedik village in southeastern Senegal. ©Global Microbiome Conservancy / Photo by F. Rondon

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn more about the Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMbC ) program, including our mission and approach to collaborations.

About the GMbC Program

Photo Credit: GMbC co-founder Mathieu Groussin and consortium members meeting local community leaders
(Varocha and Ratha-korn) in Thailand. ©Global Microbiome Conservancy / Photo by C. Corzett

OpenBiome is a non-profit organization in the United States, dedicated to advancing global microbiome research to improve public health. Originally founded as a stool bank in 2013, we have provided over 68,000 fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) preparations to physicians treating recurrent C. difficile infections. We have also enabled more than 40 clinical studies exploring the therapeutic potential of FMT for a wide range of indications beyond C. difficile including autoimmune, neuropsychiatric, and metabolic disorders. OpenBiome has since expanded our mission to catalyze microbiome science on a global scale.

The Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMbC) program is a flagship initiative at OpenBiome. Our mission is to conserve and promote understanding of the global diversity of the human microbiome to advance public health.

Originally launched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2016, the GMbC has collected samples from 1300+ individuals from 35+ underrepresented communities, generated 1,300+ metagenomic surveys, isolated and whole genome sequenced ~10K bacterial isolates, and established a Consortium of over 80 researchers in 37 countries. The first GMbC Consortium paper was published in Cell in 2021.

Now housed at OpenBiome, the program maintains strong ties to MIT and GMbC co-founders Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin, who serve as the academic leads of the Consortium from their research lab in the University of Kiel, Germany.

Current understanding of the human microbiome is biased and vastly incomplete due to a historic focus on majority populations in the United States and Western Europe. As urbanization changes the human microbiome on a global scale, there is an urgent need to understand how humans and microbes interact across a wide range of diets, lifestyles, and genetic backgrounds. We believe that increasing representation in microbiome science is critical to understand and address some of the world’s fastest growing health challenges (e.g., diabetes, IBD, autoimmune disease and other microbiome-associated conditions).

The GMbC program operates through three core activities. We:

Partner with researchers around the world to collect and study human-associated microbiota from underrepresented populations, prioritizing communities leading non-industrial lifestyles. Sampling and data analysis are standardized to enable comparison across countries.
Share these materials and data with researchers through a non-profit microbiome library.
Connect scientists across our network to spark new research projects.

The GMbC Program at OpenBiome is guided by a Science and Ethics Advisory Board.

We are committed to building equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships that advance the professional and research interests of our scientific collaborators and directly benefit the communities who participate in our studies. In parallel, we are committed to creating a high-quality, accessible global resource that advances understanding of the microbiome.

Our Approach to Collaborations

Photo Credit: Local GMbC consortium member John Rusine, filling out a dietary questionnaire with a participant. Village in west Rwanda. ©Global Microbiome Conservancy / Photo by C. Corzett

The GMbC program forms international collaborations with microbiome scientists and participating communities that provide samples. We are primarily interested in working with scientists and communities that have been historically underrepresented in microbiome research.

To strengthen our commitment to equitable collaborations, we have established a Scientific and Ethics Advisory Board comprising microbiome researchers and bioethicists.

Researchers who choose to work with the GMbC Program, establish a formal collaboration between their institution and OpenBiome.

This relationship—focusing on sample collection, characterization, and bacterial culturing—forms the core of a GMbC collaboration.

Research collaborators will also become members of the GMbC Consortium, an international academic network of scientists led by Professors Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin from Kiel University. As part of the consortium, researchers will engage in comparative, multi-country analyses and publications.

If research collaborators are interested, OpenBiome can also connect them to other third-party collaborators who wish to work with GMbC materials, data, and scientists investigating questions relevant to the research collaborators' areas of interest.

The GMbC program at OpenBiome and our research collaborators form lasting relationships with the communities we sample from. We treat sample donor communities with the highest degree of cultural sensitivity and respect, and work with community leaders to define how sampling should be performed as well as how resulting research materials can be used.

To compensate donor communities for their samples, we provide:

A benefit sharing program adapted to the interests of each sample donor community.
Long-term, accountable engagement that regularly reports outcomes and next steps.

To oversee these commitments, we have established a Science and Ethics Advisory Board comprising microbiome researchers and bioethicists.

Sample donor anonymity is protected at all times. All personal participant information, associated data, and related records are “de-identified”, i.e. each participant’s sample is immediately assigned a unique ID number that is known only by the study organizers, who maintain the key linking participant IDs with their personal information on an encrypted server/password protected laptop. Samples and data will only be released in de-identified form so that researchers cannot identify the identity of the participant.