Scientific Community Need

Microbiome research spans a broad array of disciplines from medicine, agriculture, bioenergy, and the environment, but is united in addressing core scientific questions that relate microbial communities to biological and chemical processes in human, animal, or Earth systems. Investigations using high-throughput sequencing of microbial community DNA/RNA allow scientists to assess taxonomic distributions, gene expression and function, and metabolic pathways in a variety of environments or conditions. These analytical methods allow researchers to contextualize how microbial communities both change in response to changes in their environment or change their environment in response to changes in their community. Yet, the research community is unable to achieve its full potential for cross-cutting work - from the environment to human health - given that microbiome data, tools, and computation are available in disparate data infrastructures. Apart from large-scale efforts like the Tara Oceans, Earth Microbiome Project, and US Human Microbiome Project) that cohesively collect and process data, most microbiome research is carried out in isolated projects. Moreover, no platform currently provides users with a sandbox to describe and store sequence data, discover and link data sets by important contextual metadata, and save and share project outputs. Further, most platforms cannot adaptively integrate tools and pipelines developed by the community, and offer limited integrated compute resources or require a user’s credit card to access cloud-computing.