The KFU project “Development of the proteogenomic focus area of the KFU Interdisciplinary Common Use Centre aimed to provide cell, genomic and postgenomic research in the Volga Federal District” entered top 7 of the Federal Target Program “Research and Development in Priority Areas of Scientific and Technology Complex Development in 2014-2020”.

The sum of 163 million rubles is granted for 2014-2015. In total, 22 scientific and educational institutions of Russia applied for the grant.

As reference, the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia carried out a competitive selection to award a grant from the federal budget within Federal Target Programme “Research and Development in Priority Areas of Scientific and Technology Complex Development in 2014-2020”, which was officially launched by the order#426 dated 21 May 2013 of the Government of Russia, including the projects of “Support and Development of Common Use Centres with Scientific Equipment for Living Systems”.  

According to this project, KFU research will focus on metagenomics and based at the Interdisciplinary Common Use Centre, founded in 2012. It is planned to organize fundamental and applied researches to get brand new data. Today the Interdisciplinary Centre houses over 150 unique equipment items.

The term metagenome refers to the genomic contents of an entire microbial community of a macroorganism or an econiche. All living bodies coexist with bacteria and depend on their species and number representation.  In modern science a man is considered a superorganism that possess a genome of his own and that of the microbes living on and in his body. Bacteria play an important role in a man’s organism, they take part in the synthesis of vitamins and neurotransmitters, detoxication, and generation of intestine mucous membrane, etc. That is why a human disease cannot be studied without learning the role of microbiota.

It should be pointed out that metagenomics is the very tool for scientist to study the role of microbes in the complicated relations of micro and macro organisms. Modern methods of microbe metagenome analysis allow evaluating the taxonomic belonging of microbes and proceeding to the study of an ecosystem’s gene metabolic network. And it is not necessary to isolate and cultivate microbes in artificial mediums, as the metagenomics methods let analyze the cumulative DNA of all microbes living in the medium including uncultivated ones.