Startup biotech uBiome is launching the world’s first crowdsourced effort to map the human microbiome with crowdsourced funding. The company, coming out of the University of California’s QB3, seeks to put the latest high-throughput metagenomic sequencing technology directly in the hands of people who invest in the company through the crowdsourcing portal Indiegogo.

“We believe the biological information era is going to follow the same trend that the Internet did, says uBiome co-founder Jessica Richman. “When citizens became empowered to explore the Internet via search engines like Google, usage skyrocketed. With uBiome, people can explore their personal metagenome from home. This unparalleled access to the latest science is going to change things in a big way.”

The microbiome consists of the 90 trillion microbial that live in and on the human body, nine times the 10 trillion human cells. Advances in microbiome research have found major correlations between human health and the biodiversity of microbes inhabiting the human body.

Microbiome research hit a major milestone with the completion of the Human Microbiome Project, which sequenced the metagenomes of about 200 healthy volunteers. That project laid the groundwork for microbiome research by establishing standardized sequencing technology and bioinformatics as well as setting the baseline for what “healthy” means. Current microbiome research focuses on determining how diseased states arise and whether the microbiome is a cause or a consequence. Researchers are also asking how the healthy state itself arises, for instance, how lifestyle, diet, and exercise influence the microbiome. Sequencing more and diverse individuals should offer answers.

uBiome hopes to do that by making the science and technology available to everyone so that anyone who wants can have their microbiome sequenced. “If you’d told me even five years ago that high throughput sequencing technology would be in the hands of citizen scientists, I would have told you that you’d been watching way too many science fiction movies,” says co-founder Zachary Apte.

The company is raising funds by using the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. By pledging $79 in support of uBiome on Indiegogo, anyone can have their personal microbiome sequenced. As of November 21, the company had raised $12,785 toward its $100,000 goal, with 41 days remaining in its campaign. UBiome also provides personal analysis tools and data viewers so that users can anonymously compare their own data with crowd data as well as with the latest scientific research.

Initially hoping to sequence the microbiomes of 1,000 people, uBiome wants to eventually sequence tens of thousands of microbiomes and make its research findings available to physicians. It plans to allow its customers to ask their own research questions through confidential questionnaires.

Crowdsourcing in scientific projects is not a new idea and is gaining traction in the research community as more projects are initiated as open collaborations by several different researchers, groups, or academic institutions. The recent information coming out of the ENCODE project, for instance, was a collaborative effort that has led to the discovery that most of what was thought of as junk DNA is actually involved in gene regulation.

Taking the idea a step further, uBiome hopes by opening access to its technology, it will be able to help directly address the latest questions in biomedical research.