Mission Statement

What we want to achieve

With the democratization of sequencing and the interest in the human and other microbiomes, it is essential that we lower barriers to entry to the field so that everyone can participate in exploring this exciting frontier.

The Open Microbiome Initiative (OMI) will promote education, data integration, and potentially data acquisition efforts that advance this goal.

Our vision: open datasets, tools and standards that everyone is encouraged to use and improve on to speed our understanding of the links between microbes and disease.

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Blog

SRA Discontinued

June 13th, 2011 in Featured / News
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Recently, NCBI announced that due to budget constraints, it would be discontinuing its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Trace Archive repositories for high-throughput sequence data. However, NIH has since committed interim funding for SRA in its current form until October 1, 2011. In addition, NCBI has been working with staff from other NIH Institutes and NIH grantees to develop an approach to continue archiving a widely used subset of next generation sequencing data after October 1, 2011.

The SRA was notoriously unpopular among bioinformaticians, many of their comments are available on Jon Eisen’s blog.

Nature News article

 

New Software Packages

February 16th, 2011 in Featured / News
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Three new related software packages were added to the OMI website.

 

PGP Documentary

February 2nd, 2011 in Featured / News
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Did you know there is a documentary film being made about the Personal Genome Project? Two-time Emmy Award-winning documentary producer Marilyn Ness has been following around the Personal Genome Project (PGP) staff and volunteers for the past several years. They’re thrilled to announce that she has released three webisodes featuring PGP-10 participants. Watch Webisode #1 featuring George Church; Webisode #2 featuring Rosalynn Gill; Webisode #3 featuring John Halamka.