On behalf of Dr. Rob Knight, the UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation is pleased to host a mini-symposium to celebrate the first publication of the American Gut Project in the open-access ASM journal mSystems on May 15. The American Gut Project was launched in November of 2012 as a subset of the Earth Microbiome Projectto discover the kinds of microbes and microbiomes “in the wild”. As of the middle of last year, the project included microbial sequence data from 15,096 samples from 11,336 human participants representing primarily the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, along with 42 other countries or territories, making the dataset the largest public reference database of the human gut microbiome. Join us at this event, which will open with an introduction from UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla and showcase talks from some of the main authors, such as Dr. Rob Knight, Dr. Daniel McDonald and Dr. Jack Gilbert as well as lightning talks from students and postdocs.