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Photos of different microbes: top right looks like a string of small orange pompoms; top right looks like a fuzzy aqua oval; bottom right looks like small gold orbs in the misdst of blue/purple strings; bottom left looks like bright pink thimbles.

Composite image by Jonathan Bailey, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH via Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0

The Human Microbiome Project, which was launched by NIH in 2007, provided the first glimpse of the microbial diversity of healthy humans and is exploring the possible relationships between particular human diseases and the microbiome.

Top left: Streptococcus (Credit: Tom Schmidt); top right: microbial biofilm of mixed species, from human body (Credit: A. Earl, Broad Institute/MIT); bottom right: Bacillus (Credit: Tom Schmidt); bottom left: Malassezia lopophilis (Credit: J.H. Carr, CDC).