Uploading Microbial Community Data to MG-RAST Provides an Important Resource for the Scientific Community

Additional Funding Sources

The project described was supported by Idaho State University.

Abstract

Currently it is known that there is an abundance of airborne microbes present in the atmosphere. Further, their prevalence may be strongly tied to atmospheric conditions, and geographic location. It is also known that atmospheric microbes may influence atmospheric processes. For example, these organisms may promote ice nucleation, causing precipitation events. However, information concerning these airborne microbes is not readily available to the scientific community. Therefore, we uploaded new information about airborne microbial communities to an open source web application server to in order to provide open access to scientific community. We uploaded our data to the Metagenomic Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology(MG-RAST) server, because it was developed to serve as a repository for metagenomic data. First, metadata about each sample was uploaded using the MetaZen tool available on the server. MetaZen requires 12 informational fields to be complete in order to be analyzed. Then the individual genetic sequences from each community sample were uploaded to the MG-RAST server. Immediately after the microbial community sequences were uploaded and submitted, a basic summary of the upload was provided. These results are now available to the scientific community for further analysis and comparison to other datasets.

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Uploading Microbial Community Data to MG-RAST Provides an Important Resource for the Scientific Community

Currently it is known that there is an abundance of airborne microbes present in the atmosphere. Further, their prevalence may be strongly tied to atmospheric conditions, and geographic location. It is also known that atmospheric microbes may influence atmospheric processes. For example, these organisms may promote ice nucleation, causing precipitation events. However, information concerning these airborne microbes is not readily available to the scientific community. Therefore, we uploaded new information about airborne microbial communities to an open source web application server to in order to provide open access to scientific community. We uploaded our data to the Metagenomic Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology(MG-RAST) server, because it was developed to serve as a repository for metagenomic data. First, metadata about each sample was uploaded using the MetaZen tool available on the server. MetaZen requires 12 informational fields to be complete in order to be analyzed. Then the individual genetic sequences from each community sample were uploaded to the MG-RAST server. Immediately after the microbial community sequences were uploaded and submitted, a basic summary of the upload was provided. These results are now available to the scientific community for further analysis and comparison to other datasets.