Microbes (bacteria, archaea, unicellular eukaryotes, and viruses) play an important role in human and environmental health. The molecular characterization of microbial species and communities hence has a key role to play in areas such as medicine, ecology, agriculture and climate protection. Recent technological advances in high-throughput approaches result in the generation of large data sets, whose management, interpretation, sharing, and re-use represent the main objective of NFDI4Microbiota. Consisting of ten well-established partner institutions and supported by five professional societies and more than 50 participants, NFDI4Microbiota, as a central hub, helps the microbiological research community by providing technical solutions, by fostering interdisciplinary interactions between researchers and by providing a comprehensive training program. NFDI4Microbiota offers a cloud-based system that makes the storage, integration and analysis of microbial data, especially omics data, consistent, reproducible, and accessible across all areas of life sciences. By this NFDI4Microbiota provides an infrastructure to connect the results of independent projects. Through the dual emphasis on education and services, NFDI4Microbiota ensures that microbial research is synergistic and efficient, and thus excellent.
Workshop on Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs)This workshop on Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) took place on 18 April from 09:00 to 12:00 at the ‘Landhaus’ Rothenberge, University of Münster. This interactive workshop was aimed at IT staff and was held in English. After a general introduction to ELNs, we covered the selection and implementation process of ELNs.