Advancing microbiome science together

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Enabling microbiome exploration
Founded to support the long-term advancement of microbiome science, the NMDC is building an agile, integrated data ecosystem. Our scientific mission is to provide comprehensive discovery of and access to multi-omics microbiome data. The long-term vision of the NMDC is to support microbiome data exploration through a sustainable data discovery portal that promotes open science and shared-ownership.
Supporting a collaborative data ecosystem
The NMDC seeks to connect and engage the microbiome community to unlock new possibilities in microbiome data science. Focusing on broad and inclusive activities, we aim to empower participation in data curation, discovery, and analytical processes using active partnerships among the research community.
Building community-supported microbiome data science capabilities
Data standards with expert curation
Maps existing ontologies and standard vocabularies to the rich contextual metadata used to describe sample collection and processing.
Uses ontology mapping tools and curation resources to enable automated annotation of standardized metadata to adhere to the FAIR principles.
Standardized workflows
Develops microbiome workflows for metagenomes, metatranscriptomes, metaproteomes, and metabolomics data processing leveraging high performance compute (HPC) systems
Generates and integrates interoperable and reusable microbiome data from pilot data providers
Data integration and access
Iteratively develops a graphical web-based interface that streamlines search, data exploration, and discovery.
Provides access to FAIR multidisciplinary data and standardized, reproducible data products for comparative analyses.
Engagement
Establishes support for open science and FAIR microbiome data across research teams through a tiered engagement model.
Partners with publishers, funders, and scientific societies and consortiums to incentivize data sharing and reuse.
Building a world where data is FAIR
Over the past few decades, the number of microbiome datasets being generated has grown exponentially. However, the sheer amount of data available presents a significant bottleneck for analysis and interpretation. The NMDC makes these datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) by:
Findable
Ensuring all data registered within NMDC is human and machine readable
Accessible
identifying datasets that are available, including any authentication and authorization requirements
Interoperable
Providing provenance, metadata, and uniformly processed data, we are lowering the barriers to making data interoperable
Reusable
Enabling download of data, data products, and workflows for external reprocessing
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