NFDI4Microbiota Symposium: Public Infrastructure for Making Your Research Data Open and FAIR

Outline of the NFDI4Microbiota Symposium: 'Public Infrastructure for Making Your Research Data Open and FAIR' during the 7th Joint Microbiology & Infection Conference of the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology (DGHM) and the Association of General and Applied Microbiology (VAAM) in Würzburg on June 5th, 2024

• Welcome and Introduction by Konrad Förstner (ZB MED)

• Developing and Maintaining Best-Practice Workflows and Services for Processing Microbiological Research Data by Hesham Almessady (HZI)

• Use Case Metaprot: Standardization and Metadata in Microbial Community Proteomics by Kay Schaller (ISAS)

• StrainInfo: A Central Database for Resolving Microbial Strain Identifiers by Lorenz Reimer (DSMZ)

• VirJenDB: Toward a Community-Curated and Open-Source Virus Meta(data) Analysis Platform by Noriko Cassman (University Jena)

• Closing by Konrad Förstner (ZB MED)

NFDI4Microbiota supporting microbiome research providing data access, services, training, and workflows

Introduction: NFDI4Microbiota aims to support the microbiome research community by providing access to data, analysis services, data/metadata standards, and training. It belongs to the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), which aims to develop a comprehensive research data management. Different consortia ensure a broad coverage from cultural sciences, and engineering to life sciences and natural science. NFDI4Microbiota intends to facilitate digital transformation in the microbiological community (bacteriology, virology, mycology, and parasitology).

Goals: NFDI4Microbiota aims to support the German microbiome research network through training and community-building activities, and by creating a cloud-based system that will make the storage, integration, and analysis of microbial data and (microbial) omics data, consistent, reproducible, and accessible. Thereby, NFDI4Microbiota will promote the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) principles and Open Science.

Results: To enable FAIR data management, the NFDI4Microbiota consortium develops and provides computational infrastructure and analytical workflows to store, access, process, and interpret various microbiome-related data types. NFDI4Microbiota works on developing and implementing software and standardized workflows for users to analyze their data. Further, NFDI4Microbiota offers training, spanning from metagenomics, over courses about programming in R, to research data management and ELN (electronic lab notebooks). To interact with young scientists, the consortium launched an ambassador program, thereby helping to identify the needs of their local community. All relevant information and specific services are available via the web portal. Summary: NFDI4Microbiota has established community services providing access to data, analysis services, data/metadata standards, and training thereby promoting FAIR principles and Open Science in the microbiology community.