Presentation at Australian Microbiome launch... and more thoughts on what can be built to support the target community

Recently, the two established Bioplatforms Australia framework data initiatives: Marine Microbes (MM) and Biomes of Australian Soil Environments (BASE) have been merged into the "Australian Microbiome Initiative" which will provide a nation-wide terrestrial and marine survey of microbial populations produced through metagenomics methods. The merged project includes researchers from more than 40 institutions supported by the following core partners:

• Bioplatforms Australia
• Integrated Marine Observing System
• CSIRO
• Department of Energy and the Environment

The first meeting of the Australian Microbiome Initiative took place at the Australian Museum in Sydney last week and were very happy to be able to demonstrate what we have developed in the past 5 months and how this can support the community of users who requires access to information generated from these data:

download it here - it contains a few movies demonstrating how it all works

We were very happy to get some extremely positive feedback from various attendees on the outputs so far.

We also had short session where we asked attendees:

• What should we focus on implementing over the remaining 5 months of the current funded project?
• What was their "blue-sky" vision for the Australian Microbiome effort?

The ideas for immediate needs were added to our list of requirements, and the blue sky ideas which will help to start to inform future development of systems to support this community were shared with the project coordinators at BPA.