Investigations in molecular biology have transitioned from single experiments to high-throughput endeavours spearheaded by genomic sciences. The talk will elaborate on our approaches to transform the wealth of environmental sequences and contextual (meta)data into biological knowledge on microbial diversity and function.
We are developing quality controlled databases and tools for accurate biodiversity analysis (SILVA & SILVAngs www.arb-silva.de), contextual data standards (MIxS, www.gensc.org) and large scale data integration (MEGX.net, www.megx.net). Our environmental bioinformatic workbench integrates organism diversity and abundance data, functional data (genomic data), and the environmental data contextualising them.
The talk will transition into the goals and perspectives of the EU 7FP “Ocean of Tomorrow Project” Micro B3 (Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, www.microb3.eu) as well as the Ocean Sampling Day initiative (OSD, www.oceansamplingday.org) as a primary use case. OSD took place worldwide on 21st of June (summer solstice) 2014, with pilots conducted in 2012 and 13. These cumulative samples, fixed in time and space supplemented with a broad set of geo-referenced environmental parameters will provide new insights into the relationships between organisms, their genomic repertoire, and the environment surrounding them on a global level.
Finally, an outlook of our contribution to the German initiatives GFBio (German Federation for the Curation of Biological Data) and de.NBI (German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure) to create national bioinformatics infrastructures for data, tools and services will be given.