The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) is an initiative founded by Janet Jansson, Jack Gilbert and Rob Knight in 2010 to collect natural samples and to analyze the microbial community around the globe. Microbes are highly abundant, diverse, and have an important role in the ecological system. For example, the ocean contains an estimated 1.3 × 1028 archaeal cells, 3.1 × 1028 bacterial cells, and 1 × 1030 virus particles. The bacterial diversity, a measure of the number of types of bacteria in a community, is estimated to be about 160 for a mL of ocean water, 6,400–38,000 for a g of soil, and 70 for a mL of sewage works. Yet as of 2010, it was estimated that the total global environmental DNA sequencing effort had produced less than 1 percent of the total DNA found in a liter of seawater or a gr