Project Details
The National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC), is a Department of Energy initiative led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), in partnership with Oak Ridge (ORNL), Los Alamos (LANL), and Pacific Northwest (PNNL) national laboratories. The NMDC leverages DOE’s existing data-science resources and high-performance computing systems to develop a framework that facilitates more efficient use of microbiome data for applications in energy, environment, health, and agriculture.
Nearly every ecosystem and organism on Earth hosts a diverse community of microorganisms – its microbiome. Yet we know little about the functions of individual microbes, let alone how they interact with each other, their hosts, or their environments, and how their activity varies over time or in response to perturbations. The past decade has seen tremendous advances in genome and metagenome DNA-sequencing technologies, which has led to an unprecedented volume of microbiome data being generated. However, further progress in the field has been hindered by the lack of computational infrastructure for processing and performing integrative analyses of these and other microbiome-relevant data.
The NMDC is tackling this data integration challenge by developing a community-centric framework based on large-scale, collaborative partnerships that draw on the capabilities, expertise, and resources of four DOE national laboratories. The guiding principles at the initiative’s core are: making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR); connecting data and compute resources; and community engagement that supports open science and shared ownership.
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.
For more information, visit https://microbiomedata.org/.
