Microbiomes play an important role in human health, food systems and in the environment and the research in this field has evolved rapidly over the past few decades. However, the term microbiome is not well defined and is more often driven by the technical pipeline used and not by the ecology of the investigated system. Furthermore, microbiome studies mostly focus on the bacteria neglecting other microorganisms.
Providing a clear and broadly acceptable microbiome definition is one of the fundamental aims of the MicrobiomeSupport project, which will be further disseminated at different levels.
The MicrobiomeSupport partners will get together on 6th March 2019 for a workshop to discuss what the term microbiome actually means and its relevant for research.
Key points/questions that will be addressed for the day include:
- Update of the ecological definition by Lederberg et al., 2001
- Which organisms to include (focal points for future research)?
- Which spatial and temporal scales should be addressed?
- Foodwebs vs networks
- Which standards do we need?
- Taxonomy vs. molecular binning of genomes
- Implementation of different technologies
- Need for „culturomics”
This workshop is a closed workshop (per invitation only). Please sign up for our newsletter to be informed about the workshop outcomes.
