Ocean Sampling Day Workflow Workshop

 BioVeL workflows for the Ocean Sampling Day

Ocean Sampling Day (OSD) is a large-scale community event, organized by the FP7 EU project Micro B3. The aim of OSD is to get a better understanding of the functional and taxonomic diversity of marine microbes at a fixed time point across the world oceans. In an unprecedented event, scientists and non-scientists all around the world will simultaneously measure environmental parameters and collect samples for microbial community sequencing. To ensure maximum usefulness of these samples this experiment will be done across all sites using agreed upon best practices developed within Micro B3. This will ensure a high level of consistency between data points across the globe.

Forming a unique axis of collaboration, the FP7 funded e-science project Biodiversity virtual e-Laboratory (BioVeL) together with Micro B3 is now developing e-science workflows that will be made available to the OSD community for consistent and repeatable metagenomic sequence data analysis and microbial community modeling. To kick-start the new developments, Micro B3 and BioVeL partners will meet in Bremen for a two-day workshop in March 21-22. In this workshop scientific users from the OSD community and BioVeL workflow developers meet with the goal to design workflows for basic sequence analysis and modeling of microbial communities of OSD data. Already in the workshop preparation phase it became apparent, that many BioVeL web services and workflow components from metagenomics, phylogenetics and ecological niche modeling could be re-used for the new OSD workflows, with only a few new services needing to be developed.

All in all, an exciting year lies ahead. The OSD community will benefit from an infrastructure for consistent and repeatable analyses of its microbial sequence data; whereas BioVeL can broaden its portfolio of workflows and services supported by Micro B3 scientists,delivering products that will demonstrate the usability of its e-science infrastructure to the new OSD scientific community. The longest day of the year looks set to provide the two communities with a wealth of data and unique insights into the microbial mechanisms underpinning the world’s oceans.

http://www.biovel.eu

http://www.microb3.eu

http://www.oceansamplingday.org