Second General Assembly of the Micro B3 Project

From 23 to 25 April this year 60 participants from industry and academia from 15 different countries met at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen to enhance cross-sectorial outputs and finalize preparations for this year’s world-wide Ocean Sampling Day.

The programme was divided into plenary and smaller work package-focused discussion sessions. It included two lectures from invited speakers from the high-level Micro B3 Advisory Board. Throughout the meeting, there were several excellent opportunities for networking and interacting between participants. Partners from work packages (WP) 5 and 7 discussed how to address interdisciplinary challenges, e.g. using the bioinformatics discovery pipeline for biotechnological applications of interest to WP 7. Several groups with a focus on ecosystem biology also had intensive exchanges on how to investigate the functional biodiversity of marine microbes.

Finally, major steps were accomplished in the preparation of the Micro B3 funded world-wide Ocean Sampling Day (OSD), planned for 21 June 2014, as well as the Citizen Science campaign MyOSD. These include finalizing the legal, organizational and technical basis as well as funding for sequencing of marine microbial diversity samples.