Letter to the editor November 17, 2022 November 17, 2022

Are studies of human gut microbiome the new fad following the SNP mainstream?

DOI: 10.20945/2359-3997000000568

DEAR EDITOR,

During the “pre-Human Genome Project (HGP) era” that precedes the 1990s, the availability of genetic sequencing technologies has triggered a boom of studies in literature that searched for genetic variations associated with a variety of normal and pathological conditions in humans. Hundreds of thousands of reports dealing with single nucleotide polymorphisms in the human DNA were identified adding, valuable knowledge for health sciences (). This scenario forced the scientific community to become familiar with the approaches to assess the genomic information and infer associations to phenotypes. Many candidate genes identified are now helpful for disease prediction and for intervention purposes. In parallel, there was a growing interest in unveiling the entire human genome and the expectation that this would bring light to the genesis of diseases and therapeutic strategies. The HGP and Celera Genomics data assembled sequences comprising 3.4 billion nitrogenous bases from the human DNA (,), but the main goal of discovering mechanisms of diseases to improve quality of life was incompletely achieved.

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