ABOUT EHI

What is the Earth
HoloGenome Initiative?

EHI is an enterprise launched in 2020 aiming at promoting, facilitating, coordinating and standardising hologenomic research on wild organisms worldwide

The interaction between animals and gut microorganisms associated with them impacts a wide range of biological processes of hosts, microbes and environment. Current technology enables precise characterisation of both host genomes and microbial metagenomes, which opens a wealth of possibilities to study how host-microbiota interactions affect key processes such as speciation, adaptation to climate change, disease transmission...

Standardising research practices, sharing knowledge and resources, and coordinating is essential to generate accurate, reliable and reproducible results in an efficient way.

This is the reason for the creation of
the Earth Hologenome Initiative

What is hologenomics?

It is a new research approach that consist in jointly analysing host genomes and associated microorganisms' metagenomes to study the effect of their interactions in a range of biological fields.

How are data generated?

Hologenomics largely relies on shotgun sequencing approaches, which consists in sequencing total DNA from biological samples. In EHI, both animal and microbial genomes are primarily generated from faecal material. Check out the EHI workflow.

What are the goals?

The EHI has five main goals, which are expected to yield relevant outcomes for the scientific community in terms of scientific outputs, methodological development, infrastructure availability, and networking.

How can I participate?

We welcome as many researchers as possible to contribute to the initiative. All the details about participation in the Earth HoloGenome Initiative are described in the section about participation.

What are current projects?

The EHI encompasses a number of projects, focusing on mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds. Here you can have look at the EHI flagship projects.

What is the EHI database?

Presently, the EHI boasts an internal database with more than 150,000 data entries, and a publicly accessible database offering fundamental sample information.