Description:

International Microbiome Data Coordination and Consortium Studies  

Abstract
International, large scale environmental microbiome projects bring together multidisciplinary scientists, involving the study of microorganisms and their relation to health and the built environment, genomic sequencing, bioinformatics, microbiology and preservation. The analysis of geographically distributed environmental microbiomes requires unique coordination efforts, facilitates cross-pollination of ideas and creates opportunities for development of tools for the analysis of complex populations. Applying this approach for examining soil microbial community across Crete, biofilms on national monuments and subway surface microbiomes, as part of the MetaSUB consortium, are providing novel insights on the composition, movement and roles of microbiomes.  

Biography
Dr. Lynn M. Schriml is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and at the Institute of Genome Science (IGS) in Baltimore, Maryland.  Dr. Schriml’s research program involves the creation of broadly adopted, standardization approaches for collecting and reporting of genome metadata and for classifying and annotating human diseases that accelerate science. Dr. Schriml’s research is focused on transforming complex data into meaningful knowledge, ultimately improving clinical care. Standardized descriptors of diseases and the data describing genomic sequences have become critical infrastructure components for storing, computing, analyzing, and sharing of data for studying biological systems.  As President of the Genomic Standards Consortium, Dr. Schriml leads and international team of genomic science leaders, to identify, build and implement novel metadata standards, thus providing a venue for standardized contextual descriptions of genomes, metagenomes and microbiome sequences and studies.