Success!!! Our consortium has just received funding from the Dr. Eva Crane Trust for the development of a new tool, the web-based BeeBiome Data Portal, a resource for scientists and the general public on bee-associated microbes/viruses. The objectives of this tool will be:
- Inform about the diversity of bee-associated microbes and viruses and their impact on bee health.
- Provide a standardized terminology and taxonomy of all known microbes by systematically cataloging them, indicating reference strains and reference sequences.
- Provide a comprehensive catalogue of all currently available sequence datasets about bee-associated microbes and virus (including amplicon sequencing, RNAseq, shotgun metagenomics datasets) and link relevant metadata.
- Provide a standardized procedure to upload new sequence datasets via an entry mask dedicated to bee microbiome datasets (i.e. standardized ontology and metadata to ensure transparency and allow for cross-study analysis).
- Serve as an entry point for assessing data and offering simple tools for data mining and visualization.
This project, coordinated by Benjamin Dainat & Philipp Engel, will start soon in 2019.
Congratulations to everyone involved, and thanks to the Dr. Eva Crane Trust for funding this exciting project!
