The Knight Lab at the University of California, San Diego uses and develops state-of-the-art computational and experimental techniques to ask fundamental questions about the evolution of the composition of biomolecules, genomes, and communities in different ecosystems, including the complex microbial ecosystems of the human body. Research by the Knight Lab is published across the world's leading scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and Cell, while its analysis methods are widely used in the field. Notable projects include the American Gut Project, Earth Microbiome Project, QIIME, UniFrac, Qiita, and the BIOM standard. The Knight Lab subscribes to an open-access scientific model, providing free, open-source software tools and making all protocols and data publicly available in order to increase general interest in and understanding of microbial ecology, and to further public involvement in scientific endeavors more generally.