Suchergebnisse

Meeting the food, feed, and fiber needs of a growing world population represents one of the signature challenges of this century. The UN FAO estimates that food production alone must increase by 70 percent by 2050 to meet the needs of a projected nine billion people. Demand will also increase for livestock feed, biofuel feedstocks, fiber for paper products, and construction materials. Meeting these demands will require implementation of advanced technologies, sustainable management of natural resources, and coordination of political forces. We must think beyond the boundaries of traditional agriculture, to integrate breakthroughs in plant science, engineering, environmental sciences, and other disciplines.

Accelerating the pace of microbiome science to enhance crop productivity and agroecosystem health will require transdisciplinary studies, comparisons among datasets, and synthetic analyses of research from diverse crop management contexts. However, despite the widespread availability of crop-associated microbiome data, variation in field sampling and laboratory processing methodologies, as well as metadata collection and reporting, significantly constrains the potential for integrative and comparative analyses. Here we discuss the need for agriculture-specific metadata standards for microbiome research, and propose a list of "required" and "desirable" metadata categories and ontologies essential to be included in a future minimum information metadata standards checklist for describing agricultural microbiome studies. We begin by briefly reviewing existing metadata standards relevant to agricultural microbiome research, and describe ongoing efforts to enhance the potential for integration of data across research studies. Our goal is not to delineate a fixed list of metadata requirements. Instead, we hope to advance the field by providing a starting point for discussion, and inspire researchers to adopt standardized procedures for collecting and reporting consistent and well-annotated metadata for agricultural microbiome research. ; National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) [1714276] ; This material was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1714276. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. ; Public domain authored by a U.S. government employee