Datafying microbes: Malnutrition at the intersection of genomics and global health

In recent years, genome-sequencing technology has provided new ways of seeing the hundreds of trillions of bacteria in human bodies. Through "datafication", new forms of value are emerging from microbial genomic information - implicating microbes as powerful agents of nutritional status. Scientists use metagenomic data to evaluate how food, environment and genes affect human gut microbiota, and how those microbes simultaneously affect human health. My research is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a leading US microbiome laboratory and at its field collaborator in investigating infant malnutrition in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This article looks at the social and material conditions of the Bangladeshi women and children enrolled in the microbiome study, and how microbes are datafied in order to draw a causal relationship between microbial populations and undernutrition in human hosts. How is malnutrition lived for urban Bangladeshis, and how is malnutrition studied through metagenomics? What categories of undernutrition and bodily health emerge as big data becomes a tool for nutrition science? I followed practices in homes and communities in Dhaka, while also studying malnutrition in the lab, and how both are choreographed with data-producing microbiome technologies in the quest for translational health-care strategies to treat childhood maladies in developing countries.