Biomolecular ocean observing and research is a rapidly evolving field that uses omics approaches to describe biodiversity at its foundational level, giving insight into the structure and function of marine ecosystems over time and space. To achieve global scale ocean biomolecular observations, and contribute to the UN Ocean Decade goals of “a transparent ocean with open access to data, information and technologies” and “a healthy and resilient ocean”, research groups will need a system to effectively share, discover, and compare “omic” practices and protocols. While numerous informatic tools and standards exist, there is currently no global, publicly supported platform specifically designed for sharing marine omics [or any omics] protocols across the entire workflow from initiating a study to the publication and use of its results. Towards that goal, we propose to harness the OBPS infrastructure to build a corpus of omics protocols with predefined and user assigned metadata tags that will facilitate the discovery of protocols through a series of decision tree questions.
The purpose of the Task Team is to build a corpus of omics protocols on the OBPS. To improve the user-driven discovery of omics/eDNA protocols, we will develop omics protocol templates and develop consistent omics specific protocol metadata for these protocols with the Minimum Information for an Omic Protocol (MIOP).
Our vision is to help people make better decisions in the beginning of protocol design and to facilitate comparable datasets once they are done. We aim to develop a dynamic best practice system for marine omics research that encourages transparent, reproducible and discoverable protocols. Allowing new researchers and monitoring programs to accelerate the protocol development stage and uptake tried and tested methodologies will help mature and professionalize marine omics research. The omics OBPS will provide a platform for marine omics initiatives to standardize efforts and achieve comparable high resolution biomolecular observations at a global scale.
Our mission is:
Samuel, R.M., Meyer, R., Buttigieg, P.L., Davies, N., Jeffery. N.W., Meyer, C., Pavloudi, C., Pitz, K.J., Sweetlove, M., Theroux, S., van de Kamp, J. and Watts, A. (2021) Toward a Global Public Repository of Community Protocols to Encourage Best Practices in Biomolecular Ocean Observing and Research. Frontiers in Marine Science. 8:758694. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.758694
Robyn M. Samuel, Ocean Technology and Engineering Group, National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Raïssa Meyer, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Germany Task Team Members: https://oceanexpert.org/group/478 Contact information: tt.omics@oceanbestpractices.org
