Australia Gets Microbiome Science Boost

New Roadmap Tackles Challenges for Tiny Life Research

Australian scientists are building a better home for studying the universe of microbes.

Researchers have designed a new plan for a national infrastructure to support microbiome analysis across Australia. Microbiomes are like tiny cities of microorganisms—bacteria, fungi, and viruses—living in and on everything from our bodies to the dirt beneath our feet.

This roadmap aims to help scientists better understand these hidden worlds.

Understanding the Needs

The study asked a key question: What do Australian microbiome researchers need to do their best work? They wanted to find out what tools, computational power, and data access were missing.

To get answers, scientists surveyed over 100 researchers in the Microbiome Analysis Special Interest Group. Thirty-three scientists responded, representing diverse fields like medical, environmental, and host-associated microbiome studies. The survey gathered details on:

Current methods
Software used
Computing resources

Key Findings: A Vibrant but Challenged Community

The results showed a vibrant but challenged research community.

Scientists use a mix of powerful sequencing tools:

Illumina
Nanopore
PacBio

They also tap into more than 36 different databases, with:

NCBI’s Sequence Read Archive
KEGG (a map of biological functions)

In total, around 100 different software tools are used to make sense of this mountain of data. Even with 85 percent of researchers using powerful, high-performance computing, 62 percent still reported that their current setups weren't enough, often struggling with memory or data storage.

The Vision Ahead

"The ability to extract DNA directly from environmental samples, apply high throughput shotgun or amplicon sequencing and conduct subsequent microbiome analyses has greatly advanced our knowledge of the micro-community including archaea, bacteria, fungi, and viruses inhabiting various environments."

— Study Authors

This new infrastructure will act like a superhighway and central library for these tiny explorers. It will allow researchers to share tools and insights more easily, speeding up discoveries.

Limitations and Future Steps

The study acknowledges its findings are based on self-reported data, which might have some biases.

Future steps include:

Building out the proposed platform.
Ensuring it can handle vast amounts of data.
Making advanced analysis and visualization tools readily available to all researchers.

This new plan promises to unlock deeper secrets of the microbial world, benefiting health, agriculture, and the environment.

Reference

Tiffanie M Nelson and Jeffrey H Christiansen. (2021). Microbiome Analysis Infrastructure Roadmap for Australia. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4978308