Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Tools
This working group will address the emerging and established tools for taxonomic identification, functional genomics, de novo assembly, biosynthetic gene cluster mapping, novel species identification, and standards development. These efforts will include benchmarking for all the above categories.
The International Microbiome and Multi'Omics Standards Alliance (IMMSA; https://immsa.org/) invites participants to join the IMMSA-Bioinformatics working group.
The IMMSA-Bioinformatics working group is a collection of scientists, engineers and other professionals whothat are interested in working collaboratively towards improving the computational methods for multi-omics data, especially from measurements of microbial communities. The working group welcomes people from academia, industry, government or other sectors. In order to sign up for the working group email list and Slack, please fill out this Google sheet: https://forms.gle/TAA39T1fLxrCMAFw8. Future communications will be through those channels.
This year, the IMMSA-Bioinformatics working group will focus on the question: "How do we define how accurate a microbiome profile is?". There are many bioinformatic and wet lab methods that are used to profile the composition of microbial communities. What is the right way to evaluate those different methods? The interests of the IMMSA-Bioinformatics working group are broad, but we will consider our focal working problem to be the evaluation of taxonomic profiles of microbial communities from shotgun metagenomic sequencing data.