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In a paper published in Trends in Microbiology, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, call for the formation of a National Microbiome Data Center to efficiently manage the datasets accumulated globally. By integrating and harnessing all available microbiome data and metadata, researchers could conduct larger-scale comparative analyses in order to address global challenges related to energy, environment, health and agriculture.
“The time is ripe to embark on the greatest endeavor to understand Earth’s microbiome,” said Nikos Kyrpides, DOE JGI Prokaryote Super Program head and the study’s first author.
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The publication complements the White House’s launch of a National Microbiome Initiative focused on comparing microbial communities across ecosystems to identify the “organizing principles” shaping all microbiomes. A national microbiome data center, the team wrote, would “organize, process, and serve all available environmental genomic data.”
Read full, original post: A rallying call for microbiome science national data management
