are extracted at one site, UC San Diego). All participants in the project are consented under protocol #141853 approved by the University of California San Diego’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP); the protocol specifies that all non-identifying data collected will be deposited into the public domain. Each participant is presented with a HRPP-approved questionnaire that covers diet, lifestyle, and health history, including a NIH-validated food frequency questionnaire [54]. The infrastructure to support electronic consent, questionnaires, localization for international portals, and management of over 22,000 bar-coded samples has opened the doors for external researchers and the general public alike to perform their own experiments using the framework of the American Gut Project.
