Future Plans
Our goal is to facilitate synthetic research in microbial ecology regardless of infrastructure, funding, training, and language barriers, while also harnessing existing human capital and data resources to provide new insights into microbial ecology. Going forward, our aims will be:
- To update and grow the existing MiCoDa database: we will use the established data mining pipeline to expand the range of data collection to more journals and more recent publications, and fine-tune this pipeline so that the database can be updated every two years. The database will be reprocessed using the UFZ High Performance Computing Cluster.
- To reduce asymmetry in research and foster equitability in data reuse through Datathon events: we will organize yearly events to build capacity and encourage the use of MiCoDa among researchers from biodiversity blind spots and low income countries. These datathons will invite researchers from different areas of the world to participate in the collection and preparation of local sequence data for their addition to the next MiCoDa update. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French are the main languages in which ecology is published, and will be directly targeted by these outreach events. The first Datathon took place in October 2022 in Argentina and Uruguay.