Hello from uBiome!

It’s a busy and exciting time here at uBiome. We know many of you are eager for information on the status of your kits, and we’re here to give you that update! Your kits – the very first of their kind, ever! – are being manufactured as we speak. We’re putting the final touches on the lab so that we’re ready to process your samples once they start to arrive in our mailbox. The wet lab is humming along nicely with the help of our lovely pair of Biomek liquid handling robots. We’re building the website that will display your microbiome data once we’ve analyzed your samples. As we’d promised back when you placed your order, we are still planning to ship your kits in May.

In the meantime, we wanted to share a few fun updates. First of all, our new sales website launched this week! This marks the first time since you early adopters participated in the crowdfunding campaign that people are able to buy uBiome kits again. Tell your friends, your family, anyone who missed their chance to buy a kit during the Indiegogo campaign that they can now get in on the fun and scientific discovery by ordering a uBiome kit.

I bet many of you out there are fans of TED Talks. I know I am! As a fan myself, I (uBiome CEO Jessica Richman) am honored and excited to be a speaker at this year’s TEDMED conference! I’ll be delivering my talk, “Could a Citizen Scientist Win the Nobel Prize” tomorrow, April 18 at 2:30pm EST. Tune in live and or listen later to hear me talk about the discovery that is possible thanks to citizen scientists like YOU.

Finally, we want to let you know that before you get your kits in the mail you’ll be receiving an email with a link to very brief survey. The survey will confirm important things like your shipping address, so please keep your eyes peeled for that and return your survey answers as quick as you can.

Thank you kindly!

All the best,

Jessica and the uBiome team

We’re excited that you’ve joined us in creating this citizen science community. Thank you for your support!

Over 2,500 of you joined uBiome, contributing a total of over $350,000, making this the largest successful crowdfunding campaign for citizen science to date.

We are now moving into the research portion of the project. As planned, we will send out the kits starting in May, and will update you as they are sent out. In the meantime, we are putting your kits together, setting up our website, and other great things! Here are some updates on our progress:

We are currently designing the web interface for you to view, interact with, and download your microbiome data. Making data understandable to citizen scientists is one of the primary goals of our project, and we hope you’ll be impressed!

Many of you have asked questions around shipping charges, address changes, order changes and the like. Before we start shipping out kits, we will confirm your address, send out additional billing for shipping charges, and answer any order questions you may have. You will be able to specify your upgrade kit preferences, t-shirt size, etc. at that time.

Balancing the needs of open access while maintaining your safety and privacy is very important. To achieve this end, scientists rely on an Institutional Review Board to provide ethical oversight, and we have been working with ours to achieve these goals. We will update you when this process is complete.

We are excited to create the future of citizen science with all of you!

Thanks again for your support!

We have only 6 days left for the phase of uBiome. We’re so grateful to everyone for joining us on this journey and being one of our early participants!

For these last 6 days, we have added a new perk for $49 where you can add an additional body site to an existing package — so, if you already have a GI tract kit, you can add the oral (or genital, etc.) for just $49 to the same address. (For international customers, we’ll use the same $12 shipping you already paid.)

Thanks so much for your participation, and we’re so glad to have you with us!

Hey Everyone,

We’ve just passed 1,800 contributors! Thank you so much for all of your support — we really mean that. It’s been amazing and transformative to see this many people get involved in citizen science!

Over the past week, people have approached us asking if they can sign up after the campaign ends. The answer is YES! And in order to transition to our post-campaign platform, Indiegogo has just come through and allowed us to extend our deadline.

So… for all of you who want to sign up, it’s still available until February 18th! At that time, we’ll make an announcement of how you can still join uBiome in our post-Indiegogo phase.

In order to make each individual contributor’s data as meaningful as possible to them, we need as many samples as possible to compare with. We hope the additional two weeks will allow our community to grow to over 2,000 citizen scientists.

Thank you all for your support! For those who tweeted and posted messages for us, we really appreciate it — and thank you so much to contributing to this effort, FOR SCIENCE!!!

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have Country Ambassadors now for almost thirty countries! We are definitely interested in more, though, so if you would like to join us, please send us an email to info@ubiome.com. And tell us how you would spread the word in your country!