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Welcome to the Belly Button Biodiversity Wiki!

What microorganisms live in belly buttons? The Rob Dunn Lab (North Carolina State University) explored the microbiome living inside what used to be our lifelines while inside our mothers' wombs. The lab's researchers collected belly button swabs from 153 study participants from 10 collection events. From these swabs, the scientists determined that there were 3,663 bacteria operational taxonomic units (OTUs) or phylotypes exhibiting 97% or more genetic similarity. The preliminary results have been published previously (Hulcr et al. 2012).

The Belly Button Biodiversity Dashboard breaks down the data into more comprehensible chunks. It uses Flask to connect to the bellybutton.sqlite database and to create JSON objects, SQLAlchemy to create queries in the database, and Plotly.js to create interactive graphs. These graphs are displayed via HTML, CSS, and Javascript.