Minimum information about a biofilm experiment (MIABiE): standards for reporting experiments and data on sessile microbial communities living at interfaces

The minimum information about a biofilm experiment (MIABiE) initiative has arisen from the need to find an adequate and scientifically sound way to control the quality of the documentation accompanying the public deposition of biofilm-related data, particularly those obtained using high-throughput devices and techniques. Thereby, the MIABiE consortium has initiated the identification and organization of a set of modules containing the minimum information that needs to be reported to guarantee the interpretability and independent verification of experimental results and their integration with knowledge coming from other fields. MIABiE does not intend to propose specific standards on how biofilms experiments should be performed, because it is acknowledged that specific research questions require specific conditions which may deviate from any standardization. Instead, MIABiE presents guidelines about the data to be recorded and published in order for the procedure and results to be easily and unequivocally interpreted and reproduced. Overall, MIABiE opens up the discussion about a number of particular areas of interest and attempts to achieve a broad consensus about which biofilm data and metadata should be reported in scientific journals in a systematic, rigorous and understandable manner.
The authors would like to thank Thomas Bjarnsholt and Adyary Fallarero for a critical revision of the manuscript. This work was supported by IBB-CEB; Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT); the European Community fund FEDER, through Program COMPETE, in the ambit of the FCT Project PTDC/SAU-SAP/113196/2009/FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-0 16012; the European Union Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/REGPOT-2012-2013.1] under Grant Agreement No. 316265, BIOCAPS; the Agrupamento INBIOMED from DXPCTSUG-FEDER unha maneira de facer Europa (2012/273). T. C. would like to thank FWO Vlaanderen and the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office for funding.