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Publication interests should not limit access to public data

In the version of this article initially published, the author A. Murat Eren was listed as A.M. Eren. The corresponding affiliation was given as the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery, rather than Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, and Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA. The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article as of 29 November 2017. In the version of this article initially published, the following acknowledgment was omitted: A.L. was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant number 14-50-00069). The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article as of 7 December 2017.

We present two standards developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) for reporting bacterial and archaeal genome sequences. Both are extensions of the Minimum Information about Any (x) Sequence (MIxS). The standards are the Minimum Information about a Single Amplified Genome (MISAG) and the Minimum Information about a Metagenome-Assembled Genome (MIMAG), including, but not limited to, assembly quality, and estimates of genome completeness and contamination. These standards can be used in combination with other GSC checklists, including the Minimum Information about a Genome Sequence (MIGS), Minimum Information about a Metagenomic Sequence (MIMS), and Minimum Information about a Marker Gene Sequence (MIMARKS). Community-wide adoption of MISAG and MIMAG will facilitate more robust comparative genomic analyses of bacterial and archaeal diversity.

While SARS-CoV-2 has transitioned to an endemic phase, infections caused by newly emerged variants continue to result in severe, and sometimes fatal, outcomes or lead to long-term COVID-19 symptoms. Vulnerable populations, such as PLWH, face an elevated risk of severe illness. Emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, including numerous Omicron subvariants, are increasingly associated with breakthrough infections. Adapting mRNA vaccines to these new variants may offer improved protection against Omicron for vulnerable individuals. In this study, we examined humoral and cellular immune responses before and after administering adapted booster vaccinations to PLWH, alongside a control group of healthy individuals. Four weeks following booster vaccination, both groups exhibited a significant increase in neutralizing antibodies and cellular immune responses. Notably, there was no significant difference in humoral immune response between PLWH and the healthy controls. Immune responses declined rapidly in both groups three months post vaccination. However, PLWH still showed significantly increased neutralizing antibody titers even after three months. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of the adapted vaccination regimen. The results suggest that regular booster immunizations may be necessary to sustain protective immunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) is an open-source software and data platform designed to meet the grand challenge of systems biology — predicting and designing biological function from the biomolecular (small scale) to the ecological (large scale). KBase is available for anyone to use, and enables researchers to collaboratively generate, test, compare, and share hypotheses about biological functions; perform large-scale analyses on scalable computing infrastructure; and combine experimental evidence and conclusions that lead to accurate models of plant and microbial physiology and community dynamics. The KBase platform has (1) extensible analytical capabilities that currently include genome assembly, annotation, ontology assignment, comparative genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolic modeling; (2) a web-browser-based user interface that supports building, sharing, and publishing reproducible and well-annotated analyses with integrated data; (3) access to extensive computational resources; and (4) a software development kit allowing the community to add functionality to the system.

The co-authors of this paper hereby state their intention to work together to launch the Genomic Observatories Network (GOs Network) for which this document will serve as its Founding Charter. We define a Genomic Observatory as an ecosystem and/or site subject to long-term scientific research, including (but not limited to) the sustained study of genomic biodiversity from single-celled microbes to multicellular organisms.An international group of 64 scientists first published the call for a global network of Genomic Observatories in January 2012. The vision for such a network was expanded in a subsequent paper and developed over a series of meetings in Bremen (Germany), Shenzhen (China), Moorea (French Polynesia), Oxford (UK), Pacific Grove (California, USA), Washington (DC, USA), and London (UK). While this community-building process continues, here we express our mutual intent to establish the GOs Network formally, and to describe our shared vision for its future. The views expressed here are ours alone as individual scientists, and do not necessarily represent those of the institutions with which we are affiliated.

The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) is an open-membership community that was founded in 2005 to work towards the development, implementation and harmonization of standards in the field of genomics. Starting with the defined task of establishing a minimal set of descriptions the GSC has evolved into an active standards-setting body that currently has 18 ongoing projects, with additional projects regularly proposed from within and outside the GSC. Here we describe our recently enacted policy for proposing new activities that are intended to be taken on by the GSC, along with the template for proposing such new activities.

Microbes hold the key to life. They hold the secrets to our past (as the descendants of the earliest forms of life) and the prospects for our future (as we mine their genes for solutions to some of the planet's most pressing problems, from global warming to antibiotic resistance). However, the piecemeal approach that has defined efforts to study microbial genetic diversity for over 20 years and in over 30,000 genome projects risks squandering that promise. These efforts have covered less than 20% of the diversity of the cultured archaeal and bacterial species, which represent just 15% of the overall known prokaryotic diversity. Here we call for the funding of a systematic effort to produce a comprehensive genomic catalog of all cultured Bacteria and Archaea by sequencing, where available, the type strain of each species with a validly published name (currently∼11,000). This effort will provide an unprecedented level of coverage of our planet's genetic diversity, allow for the large-scale discovery of novel genes and functions, and lead to an improved understanding of microbial evolution and function in the environment.

BackgroundWe present the Biological Observation Matrix (BIOM, pronounced "biome") format: a JSON-based file format for representing arbitrary observation by sample contingency tables with associated sample and observation metadata. As the number of categories of comparative omics data types (collectively, the "ome-ome") grows rapidly, a general format to represent and archive this data will facilitate the interoperability of existing bioinformatics tools and future meta-analyses.FindingsThe BIOM file format is supported by an independent open-source software project (the biom-format project), which initially contains Python objects that support the use and manipulation of BIOM data in Python programs, and is intended to be an open development effort where developers can submit implementations of these objects in other programming languages.ConclusionsThe BIOM file format and the biom-format project are steps toward reducing the "bioinformatics bottleneck" that is currently being experienced in diverse areas of biological sciences, and will help us move toward the next phase of comparative omics where basic science is translated into clinical and environmental applications. The BIOM file format is currently recognized as an Earth Microbiome Project Standard, and as a Candidate Standard by the Genomic Standards Consortium.

BackgroundComputing of sequence similarity results is becoming a limiting factor in metagenome analysis. Sequence similarity search results encoded in an open, exchangeable format have the potential to limit the needs for computational reanalysis of these data sets. A prerequisite for sharing of similarity results is a common reference.DescriptionWe introduce a mechanism for automatically maintaining a comprehensive, non-redundant protein database and for creating a quarterly release of this resource. In addition, we present tools for translating similarity searches into many annotation namespaces, e.g. KEGG or NCBI's GenBank.ConclusionsThe data and tools we present allow the creation of multiple result sets using a single computation, permitting computational results to be shared between groups for large sequence data sets.

This report details the outcome of the 13(th) Meeting of the Genomic Standards Consortium. The three-day conference was held at the Kingkey Palace Hotel, Shenzhen, China, on March 5-7, 2012, and was hosted by the Beijing Genomics Institute. The meeting, titled From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models, highlighted the role of data standards associated with genomic, metagenomic, and amplicon sequence data and the contextual information associated with the sample. To this end the meeting focused on genomic projects for animals, plants, fungi, and viruses; metagenomic studies in host-microbe interactions; and the dynamics of microbial communities. In addition, the meeting hosted a Genomic Observatories Network session, a Genomic Standards Consortium biodiversity working group session, and a Microbiology of the Built Environment session sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Microbial ecology has been enhanced greatly by the ongoing 'omics revolution, bringing half the world's biomass and most of its biodiversity into analytical view for the first time; indeed, it feels almost like the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the new world at the same time. With major microbial ecology research efforts accumulating prodigious quantities of sequence, protein, and metabolite data, we are now poised to address environmental microbial research at macro scales, and to begin to characterize and understand the dimensions of microbial biodiversity on the planet. What is currently impeding progress is the need for a framework within which the research community can develop, exchange and discuss predictive ecosystem models that describe the biodiversity and functional interactions. Such a framework must encompass data and metadata transparency and interoperation; data and results validation, curation, and search; application programming interfaces for modeling and analysis tools; and human and technical processes and services necessary to ensure broad adoption. Here we discuss the need for focused community interaction to augment and deepen established community efforts, beginning with the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), to create a science-driven strategic plan for a Genomic Software Institute (GSI).

A vast and rich body of information has grown up as a result of the world's enthusiasm for 'omics technologies. Finding ways to describe and make available this information that maximise its usefulness has become a major effort across the 'omics world. At the heart of this effort is the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), an open-membership organization that drives community-based standardization activities, Here we provide a short history of the GSC, provide an overview of its range of current activities, and make a call for the scientific community to join forces to improve the quality and quantity of contextual information about our public collections of genomes, metagenomes, and marker gene sequences.

This report summarizes the proceedings of the structure mapping working group meeting of the RNA Ontology Consortium (ROC), held in Kona, Hawaii on January 8-9, 2011. The ROC hosted this workshop to facilitate collaborations among those researchers formalizing concepts in RNA, those developing RNA-related software, and those performing genome annotation and standardization. The workshop included three software presentations, extended round-table discussions, and the constitution of two new working groups, the first to address the need for better software integration and the second to discuss standardization and benchmarking of existing RNA annotation pipelines. These working groups have subsequently pursued concrete implementation of actions suggested during the discussion. Further information about the ROC and its activities can be found at http://roc.bgsu.edu/.

This report summarizes the proceedings of the 10th workshop of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), held at Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA. It was the second GSC workshop to have open registration and attracted over 60 participants who worked together to progress the full range of projects ongoing within the GSC. Overall, the primary focus of the workshop was on advancing the M5 platform for next-generation collaborative computational infrastructures. Other key outcomes included the formation of a GSC working group focused on MIGS/MIMS/MIENS compliance using the ISA software suite and the formal launch of the GSC Developer Working Group. Further information about the GSC and its range of activities can be found at http://gensc.org/.

Between July 18(th) and 24(th) 2010, 26 leading microbial ecology, computation, bioinformatics and statistics researchers came together in Snowbird, Utah (USA) to discuss the challenge of how to best characterize the microbial world using next-generation sequencing technologies. The meeting was entitled "Terabase Metagenomics" and was sponsored by the Institute for Computing in Science (ICiS) summer 2010 workshop program. The aim of the workshop was to explore the fundamental questions relating to microbial ecology that could be addressed using advances in sequencing potential. Technological advances in next-generation sequencing platforms such as the Illumina HiSeq 2000 can generate in excess of 250 billion base pairs of genetic information in 8 days. Thus, the generation of a trillion base pairs of genetic information is becoming a routine matter. The main outcome from this meeting was the birth of a concept and practical approach to exploring microbial life on earth, the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP). Here we briefly describe the highlights of this meeting and provide an overview of the EMP concept and how it can be applied to exploration of the microbiome of each ecosystem on this planet.

This report details the outcome the first meeting of the Earth Microbiome Project to discuss sample selection and acquisition. The meeting, held at the Argonne National Laboratory on Wednesday October 6(th) 2010, focused on discussion of how to prioritize environmental samples for sequencing and metagenomic analysis as part of the global effort of the EMP to systematically determine the functional and phylogenetic diversity of microbial communities across the world.

This report summarizes the proceedings of the Metagenomics, Metadata, Metaanalysis, Models and Metainfrastructure (M5) Roundtable at the 13th International Society for Microbial Ecology Meeting in Seattle, WA, USA August 22-27, 2010. The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) hosted this meeting as a community engagement exercise to describe the GSC to the microbial ecology community during this important international meeting. The roundtable included five talks given by members of the GSC, and was followed by audience participation in the form of a roundtable discussion. This report summarizes this event. Further information on the GSC and its range of activities can be found at http://www.gensc.org.

This report summarizes the proceedings of the 9th workshop of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), held at the J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD, USA. It was the first GSC workshop to have open registration and attracted over 90 participants. This workshop featured sessions that provided overviews of the full range of ongoing GSC projects. It included sessions on Standards in Genomic Sciences, the open access journal of the GSC, building standards for genome annotation, the M5 platform for next-generation collaborative computational infrastructures, building ties with the biodiversity research community and two discussion panels with government and industry participants. Progress was made on all fronts, and major outcomes included the completion of the MIENS specification for publication and the formation of the Biodiversity working group.

Metagenomic studies characterize both the composition and diversity of uncultured viral and microbial communities. BLAST-based comparisons have typically been used for such analyses; however, sampling biases, high percentages of unknown sequences, and the use of arbitrary thresholds to find significant similarities can decrease the accuracy and validity of estimates. Here, we present Genome relative Abundance and Average Size (GAAS), a complete software package that provides improved estimates of community composition and average genome length for metagenomes in both textual and graphical formats. GAAS implements a novel methodology to control for sampling bias via length normalization, to adjust for multiple BLAST similarities by similarity weighting, and to select significant similarities using relative alignment lengths. In benchmark tests, the GAAS method was robust to both high percentages of unknown sequences and to variations in metagenomic sequence read lengths. Re-analysis of the Sargasso Sea virome using GAAS indicated that standard methodologies for metagenomic analysis may dramatically underestimate the abundance and importance of organisms with small genomes in environmental systems. Using GAAS, we conducted a meta-analysis of microbial and viral average genome lengths in over 150 metagenomes from four biomes to determine whether genome lengths vary consistently between and within biomes, and between microbial and viral communities from the same environment. Significant differences between biomes and within aquatic sub-biomes (oceans, hypersaline systems, freshwater, and microbialites) suggested that average genome length is a fundamental property of environments driven by factors at the sub-biome level. The behavior of paired viral and microbial metagenomes from the same environment indicated that microbial and viral average genome sizes are independent of each other, but indicative of community responses to stressors and environmental conditions.

Presented here is the complete genome sequence of Thiomicrospira crunogena XCL-2, representative of ubiquitous chemolithoautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria isolated from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. This gammaproteobacterium has a single chromosome (2,427,734 bp), and its genome illustrates many of the adaptations that have enabled it to thrive at vents globally. It has 14 methyl-accepting chemotaxis protein genes, including four that may assist in positioning it in the redoxcline. A relative abundance of CDSs encoding regulatory proteins likely control the expression of genes encoding carboxysomes, multiple dissolved inorganic nitrogen and phosphate transporters, as well as a phosphonate operon, which provide this species with a variety of options for acquiring these substrates from the environment. T. crunogena XCL-2 is unusual among obligate sulfur oxidizing bacteria in relying on the Sox system for the oxidation of reduced sulfur compounds. A 38 kb prophage is present, and a high level of prophage induction was observed, which may play a role in keeping competing populations of close relatives in check. The genome has characteristics consistent with an obligately chemolithoautotrophic lifestyle, including few transporters predicted to have organic allocrits, and Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle CDSs scattered throughout the genome.

The release of the 1000th complete microbial genome will occur in the next two to three years. In anticipation of this milestone, the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes (FIG) launched the Project to Annotate 1000 Genomes. The project is built around the principle that the key to improved accuracy in high-throughput annotation technology is to have experts annotate single subsystems over the complete collection of genomes, rather than having an annotation expert attempt to annotate all of the genes in a single genome. Using the subsystems approach, all of the genes implementing the subsystem are analyzed by an expert in that subsystem. An annotation environment was created where populated subsystems are curated and projected to new genomes. A portable notion of a populated subsystem was defined, and tools developed for exchanging and curating these objects. Tools were also developed to resolve conflicts between populated subsystems. The SEED is the first annotation environment that supports this model of annotation. Here, we describe the subsystem approach, and offer the first release of our growing library of populated subsystems. The initial release of data includes 180 177 distinct proteins with 2133 distinct functional roles. This data comes from 173 subsystems and 383 different organisms.

Our growing awareness of the microbial worlds importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earths microbial diversity., Author(s): Luke R. Thompson [1, 2, 3]; Jon G. Sanders [1]; Daniel McDonald [1]; Amnon Amir [1]; Joshua Ladau [4]; Kenneth J. Locey [5]; Robert J. Prill [6]; Anupriya Tripathi [...]