About CoMS

In 1997, the Microbiology department was funded by the DOE and the NSF to study microbial communities in natural settings, essentially studying microbiome science before the world “microbiome” was even part of everyday lexicon. This persisted for nearly two decades, when in 2013, a small group of faculty at Ohio State University began organizing around the study of microbial communities across environments and within animal and human hosts. In 2017, this science gained more formal recognition on campus with the establishment of the Microbial Communities Thematic Program as part of Infectious Diseases Institute.

Built on the early efforts and energy of many individuals across campus, The Center of Microbiome Science (CoMS) was launched in 2020 (formalized as a cross-college, University-level “big C” Center in Nov 2020) and also became part of the Microbiome Centers Consortium.

CoMS is a highly interdisciplinary network of faculty at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital representing over 100 faculty from 10 different colleges.

The four focus areas of CoMS are:

• Community

• Compute

• Capabilities

• Curriculum

This includes building community within and between investigators in microbiome science, enabling investigators to perform microbiome studies by building out molecular and bioinformatic tools on campus, and providing trainee education and opportunities to gain high-tech digital skills in computational microbiology and bioinformatics.

To date, CoMS efforts have resulted in:

• support for sole-PI and multi-million-dollar microbiome and institute grants

• the development of a five course Microbiome Training Track for graduate students

• trainee-led microbiome, virome, and advanced ecological statistics working groups

• multiple ideation, networking and training workshops and symposia around microbiome sciences

• the launch of a Microbiome Platform that offers complete sample-to-sequence-to-analyses solutions for genome-resolved microbiome and virome science that is highly scalable via the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC)