Second Micro B3 Extended Executive Board Meeting held in Bremen

On 13th and 14th of January 2015 Jacobs University organised a successful EEB at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen.

30 participants from 17 research institutes, industry and academia from 7 different countries, met to discuss the progress of the project and plan the final year’s activities and goals.

Four members of the Advisory Board have also attended the meeting, giving positive feedback on the work done by the Consortium so far and actively contributing to the discussions, also providing the Consortium with their valuable inputs on the repetition of the Ocean Sampling Day in 2015.

The most important outcomes of each Work Package were presented during the opening talk given by the Coordinator and the WP leaders:

• coordination of the Ocean Sampling Day 2014 activities and performance of sampling analyses (WP2)
• development of model for organising data flows for sharing metadata (WP3)
• development of best practice guidelines on marine sample collection, logistics and bioinformatics for marine sampling stations and cruises and the  Micro B3 Standard Operating Procedures and Reporting Standards (WP4)
• further development of the MicroB3-IS (WP5)
• provision of an annotation pipeline to identify viral sequences in metagenomic reads and development of network analysis approaches (WP6)
• establishment of workflow for the computational prediction of substrate selectivity of homologues of genes with known activities, a system to identify networks of co-occurring unknown genes hinting at their hypothetical functions (WP7)
• finalization of the Micro B3 model agreements on access to marine microorganisms and benefit sharing (ABS) to be used for pre-competitive utilization and research, for competitive research and for hybrid situations (WP8)                                                

An overview on the dissemination goals achieved so far was given by J. Wesnigk (leader of WP9):

• Publication of more than 45 peer-reviewed papers
• Organization of 3 Workshops and 6 Training courses
• Participation to more than 70 international workshops, conferences, meetings and EU-wide events
• Production of 2 movies (OSD movie and Micro B3 Documentary Film)

Moreover, ad-hoc discussions were held to prepare the next Ocean Sampling Day (OSD), planned for 21 June 2015, the Citizen Science campaign MyOSD, and the Final Conference of Micro B3.