Guide to metagenomics data standards and best practice published

Our latest publication, a guide to data standards and best data practices in metagenomics publication is now available online in GigaScience:

Petra ten Hoopen, Robert D. Finn, Lars Ailo Bongo, Erwan Corre, Bruno Fosso, Folker Meyer, Alex Mitchell, Eric Pelletier, Graziano Pesole, Monica Santamaria, Nils Peder Willassen, Guy Cochrane; The metagenomic data life-cycle: standards and best practices. Gigascience 2017 gix047. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/gix047

In the paper, we bring together much previous work in standards in this area, both from our group and others’, laying out requirements and recommendations for the capture and management of environmental sequence data and metadata relating to biomes, sampling, experimental design, sample processing, library creation and computational analysis.

In addition, we make a call for the archiving of the results of computational analysis, such as the identification within microbial communities of taxa and functional elements; the availability of these data is key to providing discoverability and integration of the world’s environmental sequencing studies.

Working as part of the ELIXIR Excelerate Marine User Community, we brought together the expertise and experience from the ENA and EMBL-EBI Metagenomics teams at EMBL-EBI, the Arctic University of Norway, the Station Biologique in Roscoff, France, the Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies, Bari, Italy, Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, USA and Genoscope, the CNRS and University Évry val d’Essonne in Évry, France.