The NFDI4MICROBIOTA Work Programme
Förstner, Konrad
The NFDI4Microbiota Work Programme - Empowering the microbiology community. A lecture by Prof. Dr. Konrad Förstner
 Okay, at first let me warmly welcome you. It's great to have so many people here again and to discuss with you what we are and we are NFDI for micro-blogger, what we intend to do. We use this mostly as a way to communicate our ideas and current plan to you, but more importantly also for you give us more feedback what is missing, where you might see gaps and what we should improve. A little bit of background, the proposal has to be handed in end of September, so we have a little bit more than a month ahead of us and it will be definitely stressful and intensive, but we still have ways or still have the option to adapt things and this is why we think having your feedback right now is very useful for us and we thank all of you for being here and hopefully sharing it then later your impressions in next practice. We will start with a small slideshow that I've prepared and I will share my screen now. Warm welcome here to the NFDI for micro-builder workshop. We would like today, this is our fourth one, so this time we would like to show we actually our work program, we had several of those meetings before and last time there was clearly the wish we should go a little bit more into detail and describe what we want to do and this is exactly what we will do today. At first when we talk about community, so what is actually our community because micro-builder seems sometimes not to be or is a rather broad term and just to specify who we are addressing with this endeavor, we are basically talking to a broad range of people, a broad range of researchers, so basically people from bacteriology but also virology, mycology, protestology and also parasitology and I think we can combine these different communities because they have certain things shared and also the member of NFDI for micro-builder have backgrounds in all these fields so we hope to help all these communities that we put now together into this larger community of microbiology. The plan for today is the following, as not everybody is precisely aware, what is NFDI and how this is meant to be, I would give again a short introduction to this, I try to keep it short but this is sometimes needed because NFDI in general is rather different. Then I will dive a little bit into NFDI for microbiota and our ideas and then we will have a more detailed discussion of the work program, we will guide you through the different points and you can already there ask us but otherwise we have as a fourth point, we have a feedback plan where you ideally can tell us what was good, what is maybe missing and we have this in different forms, for the ones who can unfortunately say only shortly, we have a short poll, we have a pad where we can communicate and we also have short breakout rooms or small breakout rooms where you can discuss in a smaller round what you see as a good thing and maybe where you see some improvements. Right, at first a little bit about the NFDI itself and there we have to go a little bit further back even. The Council for Scientific Information Infrastructure, RAD for Informations Infrastruktur was implemented in 2014 by the Joint Science Conference and the aim is to give recommendations on a systematic level, no implementations or on an operational level but really the high level recommendations where, what the scientific community should do and how this can be guided or controlled by a political level. The recommendations that they came up with was to build a national research data infrastructure NFDI, National Forschungsdateninfrastruktur and by this, well laying the foundation for a new level of science ideally. So it should be a German wide network of competences that are important, this is key, driven by the scientific communities. So it's not that infrastructure should be set up and then people might come but it should be clear from the beginning on that this is driven by the scientific community. And also they mentioned that it's important for this to change the type of funding that we have sustainable structures here, not a project base as we know this usually but have long term possibilities to maintain infrastructure. And also the people should be changed or the different jobs required for this should be established. So data librarians, data scientists, data stewards, these kind of new job profiles should be part of this change that basically help to improve the scientific or the research process. And this also means investment in minds, so it's less about building new infrastructure but connecting available ones and to rather put the money into the development of new stuff and different operations of research data management and services. In the end what is expected to happen or what is wished to happen is a fundamental change of the scientific culture to interconnect it, an open culture that exists in parts already but that is not there where it could be so far. And it is pretty clear that such a transition takes long and the estimate is 15 to 20 years. So we see that the NFDI itself is a rather different beast than let's say a normal project to run but it's actually a fundamental change inside of the research community and that will take quite a while. The joint science conference decided to fund that research data infrastructure and with roughly 90 million euros per year until 2028 and 90% is coming from the federal government and 10% from the states and I will tell this later on this already has already started. The gaps to fill and the tasks to do are the following, this is at least what was suggested, define common standards which is often lacking and due to this exchange of data for example is much harder, development of new methods to evaluate data, enable subsequent use of data so better sharing and reuse basically and identify demands for research data management to improve them later on but also general community building in order to share best practices and also to form a governance structure. So this should happen inside of these different consortia so the NFDI should be built by different consortia but in the end it should be one single NFDI if you see like this so interaction is very important here as well. Can we ask questions or questions later? Yes please, no you can do this already now if you like. This is Falker, thanks for letting me ask. I hope you guys are not distracted by the plane so I'm wondering about defined common standards the first point on your current slide because it seems to me like there is already an abundance of standards out there and it's really the actually proper use of the proper standards that's lacking and it's tools for standards that help us do the things that we all know we ought to do which is not doing for several various reasons actually. So can you comment on that? Yeah sure, I mean you're absolutely right and inventing a new standard doesn't help anyone so there are definitely gaps where these standards are missing but under this umbrella I would also put what you basically said and the spread of the available standards and maybe also one word in terms of standards clearly there should be not a German standard or it doesn't make sense to have national standards but that it's very important that this is basically done on an international level and we will see this later. We have people inside of NFDI for micro-voter that are experienced working on these kind of committees. So we have clearly a need for developing you once but also the task is to bring this to the people and this is also what NFDI for micro-voter and general all NFDI consortia are aiming to do basically looking around what is there and how can we implement this in our infrastructure and how can we also teach this to people. Thank you. Yeah okay thank you very much. The selection and evaluation of the different consortia happened and will happen by the DFG it's a strictly scientific process but the final decision is then made by the joint science conference and clearly expert committees are formed that are basically looking at this and looking for the different aspects of this and we have a look at these aspects in a few slides but first to mention the application or the funding happens in three rounds so the first round was already last year the autumn of last year the first set of consortia and in their proposals and they got meanwhile their response and started basically or will start in autumn now and then there is the second round and we will apply for the second round basically this autumn as mentioned and then there will be a third round in 2021 so next year basically. The aim is that in the end there are around 30 consortia roughly speaking and currently it looks really like this number seems to be rather realistic and it's about 70 million projects cost plus funding and overhead and so on so roughly this 85 to 90 million and basically between five and two and five million funding per consortium I think roughly it's three if you divide this properly and that's roughly what it's aimed for so basically let's speak roughly of three million euros per year per consortium for around five years. Exactly the funding period is for five years clearly the aim is to extend this later on but we will start basically with five years and basically there is a topical or methodological focus there are a few cross cutting consortia that are already formed this and in principle NFDI is also the result of this we started as NFDI for life that still exists as NFDI for life umbrella but those cross cutting consortias were not allowed to apply so far that might happen next year but clearly this is an important part connecting the different communities later on. The criteria for the selection of these consortias are the readiness and relevance of the consortium and the research data management strategy and also the structure itself and viability. Yeah with all this background and we can actually even stop here if you have any questions already regarding NFDI and the formation of consortia I wanted to keep this rather short but still as this kind of special I wanted to give a very short background here seems to be not the case so I will continue with them NFDI from my quota and specific. I guess I don't have to tell this to people here in the call but still I need to make the point here microbial species and viral particles are affecting us basically everywhere they are influencing our health and I think the last month of the corona pandemic made it pretty clear that we need to take care of this we're still facing a lot of issues regarding antibiotic resistance and many other things basically a lot of diseases are caused by this also our gut microbiome and microbiome on other parts of our body are crucial for our survival and our health so that's pretty clear but what is often neglected is the strong impact actually on the whole ecosystem that basically the majority of the biomass out there are actually microbes and that all our food webs and our climate itself are influenced and are influencing microbiota and due to this we need a deep deep and broad understanding of these organisms since basically the beginning of humankind we are also using microbes for food production and in agriculture so they are key components in in this and this is why we need to understand this and meanwhile also lots of chemicals and vaccines on our generated on a biotechnological manner again understanding microbes here is a key is a key to a successful establishment of these kind of technologies so I would say it's it's indoubtable that microbes are of higher relevance for human beings and the society in general but I said I guess everybody knows this year still one thing to keep in mind is that scientific advances or the advance of science is always bound to technologies and if you look at this image here some might recognize this this is the one of the first microscopes developed and that was a game changer because suddenly we could see the small living beings there and this basically changed how we could perceive the world and could do science today we have again a change of tools and not not sure if everybody is recognizing this but this is basically a bunch of sequencing machines and VGI so today we have a lot of technologies high super technologies that we can basically with a push of a button generate terabytes of data and that is at first very good this means we we can perform science in a much more efficient way than than we did this before decades ago and we can basically generate a vast set of data easily well but the critical point is now translating this data into really insights terabyte of data doesn't help us because this is not not a solution to the problems that we're facing and this translation of data and insights is basically the scientific process and we think we we can do this better so there are common common challenges that researchers in microbiology are facing when they need to translate basically data into insights and in general on a very basic level is already the missing data management and I'm a bioinformatician by myself and I you know I had this rather often that people with a with a hard drive came to me or told me are can you please shortly download this from there and then a few years later they asked me oh do you have still the data because I've lost it and I've looked at where it is right now so maybe you have it somewhere I usually have it somewhere because I have a certain data management but still this is a fundamental skill that we need to give people and provide infrastructure to people to and there's often missing basically once you have your data somewhere in place and you want to start then people often recognize afterwards oh okay I did now let's say sequencing or a proteomics but I've no way of translating this into things that I can handle so a bioinformatic expertise is often required and missing once you have a terabyte of data lying around you might also recognize well this cannot be necessarily crunched on my little laptop here but I need a little bit more computational infrastructure I need a server and I need ways of storing things in there and I need to need to have software for do not this and that can be also a hampering part sometimes we do not have to generate new data but sometimes we just need to find data that is already generated for different purposes the problem is that there is a poor findability and this is kind of connected to the to the point below lack of metadata because if there are no metadata or metadata standards that needs to describe our data much better then it's very hard to go towards for find this and if we have a rich set and enforce this rich set of metadata connected to our data we can look for studies that did different things maybe from a different perspective but that can be integrated into our study that we want to run and by this principle making science much more efficient and much more cost effective and this is also then here limited access and reuse of data often high throughput analysis are done for example but the data is not necessarily available or again the metadata is not given there luckily we see at least the trend in there but still not everybody knows how to make data accessible in a proper fashion and another thing is that often with a lot of manual creation databases are generated for example in a PhD project and then as soon as the PhD leaves the lab this these kind of database are not maintained anymore and we see this kind of data rods and they see loss of very valuable data and information out there so these are a few common challenges that we see independent of the field in microbiology and that we would like to address and where we want to make science better and frictionless and seamless basically so that we have this kind of easy translation from insights into from data into insights. Konrad, is this the first one again? Sorry, you went back to the previous one. So I mean I read this slide and I have to apologize because I'm obviously new to this consortium and new to Germany again so I'm wondering about reading this slide because all of this is my friend friends at the EBI they would just say okay this is what we do. Yeah, and you're absolutely right and we'll see later we are exactly talking with the EBI regarding this so basically they highly appreciate it that we approach them in order then being did you talk to Guy Cochran or were you talking to him? No, we talked to Oeth Upweiler so basically and so basically we are on a very high level there and we basically offered that we bring this to the German community because you're absolutely right it's and we do not want to basically reinvent the wheel and start new repositories for example and the complete opposite actually we want to look what is out there or we know what is out there and want to guide the community to make better use of that. So I really appreciate your question here and absolutely agree that we basically solve things that are partially solved not everything but that are partially solved but the solution that we provide is basically bring this to the microbiological community that is often not doing this because these practices are kind of neglected and I can say this from my own experience here maybe I have different ones but it's pretty often pretty much the case that these kind of things are hampering. No I happen to agree I think there's a lot of there's a lot of airspace between where Guy Cochran who's the person at EBI doing this working for directly for Oeth Upweiler is and where usual the customers are usually and there is a translation layer missing and what what you're saying is you're positioning yourself as a translation layer between EBI services and that sounds great okay. Exactly, exactly. Thank you very much and again please feel free to interrupt me thank you Falka for being a good example how to do this here thank you. So our vision in general is that microbiologists and researchers from related fields can translate research data easily into a deep understanding of microbial species and their interaction on a molecular level so I read this and now a little bit more interpretation in principle we would like to take the friction out of the system. I mentioned this before often people generate data in one place then carry it on a hard drive to another place then stuff gets lost then they put it on one server we need to go somewhere else need to do analysis on this machine and then on that machine in the end they want to publish this and need to upload it somewhere else we want to take this friction out of the system make it much much easier for the scientific community basically to translate this data into insights and also independent of your your background so if you think let's say if you think in microbiome analysis so consortia of different species this is something that you can do as a medical doctor who is doing maybe some research and has some samples that he or she would like to analyze or you can do this as somebody who is trying to study oceans and the the procedure is pretty much the same but the question the questions that you're asking are rather different and sometimes there are even not your core questions but they are connected to what you're looking at so also these kind of related fields that I as I mentioned here would really profit from this kind of approach. Our mission as NFDI for microbiota is actually act as a central hub and support the community with access to data and also services data and metadata standards but also training basically helping people to help themselves with these kind of things. Coming to the consortia and we are kind of active since 2018 as mentioned we work hard in the beginning of NFDI for life umbrella and we still are connected to that but we extended since since that time so we have 10 so-called co-applicants and applicants so basically ZFB Med is the applicant but the others are so-called co-applicants this is the official speak here basically so the vocabulary so we are 10 of applicants co-applicants and as you can see we have a very broad background starting from infrastructure providers to universities to institutions dedicated to to this field and with this we have a well a broad spectrum of technologies available of capabilities of expertise and also a broad network inside the community so I would say we are definitely part of that microbial community. We also have participants and basically unfortunately you see this at the very bottom we had to close the list for the time being and that is mostly something to do with the evaluation process so August 15th was the deadline to handle in a letter of intent for the NFDI application and that was basically the the line to draw who's in and who's not who's in right now I would say because clearly the intention is to to use the infrastructure developed here and the solutions and to roll them out to a large fraction of the scientific community. Still in the beginning we needed to be limited to a certain set and that was basically the line to draw and we have now around 50 participating institutions and networks and this includes 3DFG priority programs, 3DFG collaborative research centers, one plus of excellence and we also have the next generation sequencing competence center which is also funded by the DFG as participants. The participants I've not written this in here but they are coming from all larger societies so basically communities we have people from universities, we have Max Plank in there, we have Leipzig in there, we have Helmholtz in here, we have Fraunhofer in there and basically a broad mixture in terms of topics we have bacteriologists, we have people working on archaea, we have people working on viral particles, we have people working on parasites, we have people working on algae so we have I guess everybody in the boat to have a I would say a little bit more than a very good test balloon and to establish these kind of approaches that we are thinking of. We also have supporting societies so basically the four I would say large societies VAM and DHTM for the bacterial and also archaeal people, we have the parasite people involved and we have also the viral society involved so with this we also think that we have a good standing inside of the community and importantly address what people want, it doesn't make sense to come up with our solutions that might be not needed by the different researchers but in the end we want to establish this channel to the communities in different fashions in order to fill gaps that people see. Putting this all on a map not the societies but basically all our co-applicants participating in institutions, networks and SPPs and SFPs we see we also all over Germany located and think we have a rather good standing here again and this coming a little bit into into Falker's question we also have international partners and networks we want to mention a few here due to Denbi we are part of LXC or contribute to LXC, clearly one big thing on the horizon or actually more than on the horizon but pretty close now is the European open science cloud EOSC, you've seen we have EMBL in the boat and EMBL or one outstation of EMBL is EMBL EBI and we are in close contact as Falker mentioned already they have a lot of solutions at hand and we basically want to be the interface to the German community and they really appreciate it that we would like to go in this direction. There are other initiatives like from GoFair, the fair microbiome and other networks implementation networks that we are interacting with and also for example the NCCR microbiomes from Switzerland's contact with us already and you see we you saw the the members or basically the co-applicants and you know we are very well connected inside the European international network and that is crucial. I mentioned this already before having let's say German standards doesn't make sense it also doesn't make sense to start new repositories for let's say sequencing data instead we are the local representatives to help people using this infrastructure that is out there and filling that gap in order to well make science on international level happening and science is always something that is global and cannot be national and that was by the way if I was not involved but at least this was a little bit reported the F so the national in NFDI was always a little bit debated because well research cannot happen only locally. Yeah then we have a small slide on that roughly displays the governance interactions that we that we are considering. We and let's let's maybe focus on the important part here so we are going to a step to the scientific board that is basically represented by the societies and also by international partners but also clearly we have a user council that is formed by participants in our user community clearly we need to interact with the NFDI directorate and that is one thing that was just recently established so basically this is infrastructure that we can build upon now and also in terms of contracts and all these kind of things we will not basically have a need a new association for this so this will be all under the umbrella of the NFDI directorate as centrally. Clearly we also will interact with other consortia I will dive into this in a second and clearly we try to integrate the data generators as mentioned we have the four sequencing centers involved but many of our participants have also sequencing centers or proteomics centers or other omics technologies at hand and there we can or this can be used as kind of a test balloon and or more to to establish this kind of workflows and the data handling and also the teaching and training there. Conrad is a question sorry sorry sorry I seem to be the only person asking question. I highly appreciate that please. I feel really awkward I owe you beer whenever we meet. No no. So how does how does one become a microbeauty service center? Yeah in principle those service centers are mainly meant to be given or hosted by by the applicants and co-op applicants but in principle there is no limitation that a participant can cannot do that and we as other consortia we will also ask for flex funds so flexible funds that can be allocated and given also to participants in order to actually give or provide a certain service and that that should help us also to fill gaps that we are not aware of and or not yet aware of that basically come up with a new technology is established or something like this and we are aiming now for five years and maybe even beyond that and clearly being agile and able to adapt to new needs is is crucial and there are also other members of the community so basically participants could become such a service center and could establish a service as such. So basically coming back to your question if you have a good idea that is missing or if you see something that we have not included so far please contact us and we we can see how this fits into our image there and that might be also something that is maybe not possible right now but that's something that is happening after a few years when we when we know that the base needs are covered and then new services for example need to be established. This is why we wrote here at the bottom and for micro-border members and not necessarily only the applicants and co-op applicants because in principle also participants that we see as member of that could contribute. Can I maybe interject? Yes please. Right so maybe this comes later I don't know maybe you could go into a bit more specifics of what we're talking about here in terms of kind of compute centers hardware and such because all of the discussions tend to happen on a somewhat higher level like how can we integrate how can we analyze I think the very first step needs to be like how do we manage the data and what's the actual physical hardware that does this? I can answer this already here we have a little bit like this later in the task areas but one core part or one core idea was and I mentioned this in the beginning was that the money should go into people basically and not to I have not mentioned there but not into hardware so there will be no funding for hardware as such and this is in the beginning sounds a little bit awkward but NFDI is basically meant to be a networking endeavor so it's mostly that the things that are out there should be better used and due to the networking of the different notes inside of the community the improvement should happen. Clearly this won't be enough and basically the NFDI is one part of it and EOSC is the other part so I guess there will be complementary funding happening or needed actually to do this. What you will see later on but I can do this here right now we have Denbi so the German bioinformatics infrastructure here and on board and that is for example the hardware that we'll use in the beginning and where already certain services are around. Maybe another question from my side. Yes please. The NFDI is called microbiota but it looks like that it's purely sequencing. To implement other technologies like proteomics, metabolomics, cultureomics whatever in this field to really to address the question of microbiota. No you're absolutely right and I'm not sure if I state this somewhere down there and we are not limited to sequencing and I mentioned this in the beginning already also other databases that might be of use are useful and we have actually it's a good point I'm not sure if I put this into the slides but it's also in our abstracts and we are not limited to sequencing we also have people with those proteomics background, metabolomics and we also have people with a biotechnology background to also put these kind of things into the game and only focusing on sequencing would be definitely not enough. I completely agree also we aim to interact with other consortia regarding imaging data for example so it's so much more than only sequencing. Sorry if I made this impression but it's definitely beyond that so thank you very much for the point here. Anything else that would like to kind of? Yeah let me ask another question since I'm in a habit of doing that. Yeah go for it. So I'm naive now okay I have a new aluminum machine it yields four terabases per run where does my hardware go where does my uh my fast queue files go? Who runs the analysis pipeline? Where does the data get stored? Those are questions that almost immediately come to my mind. Is this something that this project is about or is that okay? Yeah we aim to address that exactly but the crucial part is actually that before you sequence a single base that your metadata is properly annotated and stored. This is actually the one of the key things that we try to interact with the data generators and help them to enforce certain standards in terms of metadata that are then stored by us and also the data ideally is stored by us additionally so that they ideally. Sorry can I ask yeah let me get that so I mean you know my background right you know this is what I've done that doesn't seem to be a working proposal because you're basically following the model that that EBI is failing at and NCBI are failing at where you require metadata to be stored centrally prior to submission of sequences and this model has been proven not to work over and over again. Yeah because you don't have the mentor and the issue is usually the case the problems usually usually that the scientists themselves are not very keen on putting metadata into this and this is where data stewards and data librarians come into the game. So basically by educating this this kind of new jobs these new kind of roles that are sysed in the connection of metadata and consultancy of that and we try to overcome that issue and also one thing also that it's local and basically if you are kind of well forced to add this metadata then then you have well higher motivation to really enter these kind of things but again data quality and checking of this needs manpower and this is exactly what we want to put into the game. I'm not sure I follow I have to admit so it's the plan to have decentralized curators at basically every site because it seems to me like the reason we don't have data curators is because data curators don't scale. They don't scale but this is why you need to invest in them and it's still important so you train the scientists themselves the researchers themselves but you additionally give support by professional data curators data stewards that are helping to improve that situation. Interesting so let me comment on this from the perspective of the international metadata community because the GSC has basically analyzed the same problem or the same sphere and we've come to the conclusion and I'm their executive board that the solution here is not manpower but software. Which is one part of the whole thing clearly but you need also support it's both sides clearly and basically having an infrastructure that is assisting here and also holding all that information later on and also putting this into into a discovery service and so on that that's all part of it that we would like to establish but I think the software alone is not solving that but it's it's it's part of the solution. Maybe I could add something to that. So we are one of those data generators so we are one of four national sequencing centers and there are certain things that we can do that are otherwise a bit difficult to achieve so when a customer requests a sequencing project with us they would then be able to say this is something that should go into the NFDI infrastructure and we would then be able to automatically capture a whole range of metadata that is otherwise very annoying to produce like what sequencer, what library kits, what read length, all of that stuff. What we will not be able to do obviously is all the biological metadata. Where was this sampled? What organism is this? So there's obviously still a gap but at least some parts of the metadata should be then we're talking about software I guess. Yeah exactly yeah so ideally this falls all out of your limbs or even your electronic laptop notebook and you see later on that these kind of things are also addressed by us. It's also kind of changing the culture that was a point I made very early and the culture also means the whole scientific workflow. For example if journals are requesting as they do now more and more you have to put your data there but if they are also requesting the metadata then we have a good leverage to motivate people doing that and I know that it's extra effort. This is why having dedicated people working on this is crucial. I don't say it's easy, I really don't say it's easy but it's part of an approach that has different facets and we try to address all of those in here. It's definitely a challenge as it was before if you just give people the raw sequencing data and then tell them go upload it to EVI. I don't think that works and I guess that's also what this is kind of boiling down to and we're sort of trying to take that away this sort of initial barrier and saying your sequence with us will take care of the submission and then you just have to fill out this Excel sheet essentially and then we can track all of that as one submission and make it automatic in a sense. Exactly and not enter into it also several times right that you do this once and we're taking care of this metadata and pass it on and once the project is in the state of publication this kind of stuff can be directly given then to the central infrastructure in EVI or even NCBI if needed. By the way this is referred to as the metagenome registry, something we implemented with EVI a couple years back. It's a bunch of basically JSON that you need to work against. I'm still unclear as to the number of data curators we're talking about. Are these basically for the, you mentioned a limited number of data generators or are they basically limited to four or is there a larger number? Yeah no it's not a large number so far but this should be also compensated by training. It's basically central organized and not unfortunately not each sequence in the center will have somebody available like this. This is unfortunately not possible in this funding scheme if you boil it down what needs to be done there. But again hopefully this can be extended so we see this more as a starting point to showcase all that and then in terms of other funding getting more human power into the boat. But I really like the discussion so I'm very happy for further questions and that's also crucial right for us to get your feedback and as I said it won't be easy and it won't happen you know just by pushing a button it will be a long and dry path. I'm rather sure but I think it's worth walking this and if you have experience with this we're very happy to build upon those. Okay then I would say I would continue here. There is the so-called Leipzig Berlin Declaration for Crosscutting Topics that is part of let's say the NFDI community in general and we also signed that so we are also very happy to work together on these topics and share our opinions and also put even some energy into this and working on this together. More importantly we have bi-directional agreements with different consortia on very different topics where we would like to work together and have a heavy exchange in different fields that can be based on standards but that can be also technical infrastructure and several of our co-applicants are also members of different consortia so it makes also sense to use common infrastructure and basically leverage the synergies and clearly we are still open for further interactions with other and maybe upcoming NFDI consortia and if you think back microboter are a basic found area so it is crucial also on a scientific level to interact on these kind of things together. All right so the planned work program in a rough overview consists of these five task areas plus we have something which is called the use cases which they see connecting all these kind of things and I would like to go slowly with you through the different measures that we have. Let's face it the most interesting one is number four still the other ones are of relevance but number four are the well number one and number four are the ones that are closest to the people and are the actual things for the research community. So let's start clearly we need to do outreach in order to make people aware of this and by that avoid kind of double work and also get input by other people who have already experienced this. The connection to other NFDI consortia as mentioned is strongly ongoing and that's also very important to avoid reinventing the wheel several times and also the connection to international partners as mentioned before is crucial in order to have an international solution in terms of technologies but also standards and maybe also not actually maybe but also on the level of training. Clearly we need to do also some public relations that's very common but we also need to communicate into politics what we need and that is something that we actually saw a lot also in the recent month in terms of Covid because there were different funding or there was different funding happening interestingly very little on the omics level and on high throughput data but I think if we can establish a link to there we can also make them better understand how research is happening today and what kind of things are required. And last and definitely not least is training education in support. This is actually very crucial that this is maybe one thing that we can start very early because in the end we need to invest basically in minds as it was actually demanded and having a deep understanding of the problems that high throughput technologies bring and what kind of requirements are there and what is actually today good scientific practice is crucial. We have in the consortium several people who are very strong in the training aspect and we would like to use this network to bring this to many more people interested in basic data analysis but also good data management and everything in this direction. Standards and policies who mentioned this already before it's crucial to work on that. There are often already standards out there but it's also very important to look around how this can be brought to the people in the end and how to kind of enforce it. I would say force people to use it but to enforce the implementation of those in the different systems and by that removing a lot of friction and make movement of data and metadata easy and by that also improving this whole work process of scientists. We mentioned this again also before. Ideally you enter your metadata once or ideally the metadata is actually recorded by the machines then given downstream and building on these standards is basically crucial and sometimes unfortunately there are no standards and they first have to be developed and that would be also part. Similar thing is also even before the actual recording happens as a piece for experimental procedures and how they can be recorded would be also one thing that we would work on. Standards of workflows and tools there are things like CWL so common workflow language and so on that are things that we would like to support and extend and also implement in our structure. Also the development of policies for data management and publication sharing. I mentioned this that is kind of important to make clear that a publication should not look like how like it looks looked before let's say decades ago but that today publications must be much more transparent and we luckily have the means for doing this so there should be the data available there should be code available there should be also provenance of the data described. It should be pretty clear how we came from the original experiment to the measurement to the insights that were generated and that should be all part of publication and that should be shared and also here we see as a gap into the microbial community we come from let's say a very strong open access and open science background we all were fighting for fair data since many years already and basically here we want to be the translator for these kind of concepts and policies into the community. And legal policies and legal issues are here also important regarding licenses also here often a lot of training is also needed and people are not aware what kind of licenses they should use can use in order to make sharing of data possible and what kind of data they can actually reuse again. Okay then the technical infrastructure as said this is maybe something people are not so much interfacing with directly but still it's super important so the computational infrastructure operations itself as mentioned we are heavily building on Denby which is in my opinion is very successful and unique network that is the foundation not only for us but also for other NFDIs and that's a great foundation for the work here. We will also need to go further into data storage services including management and access control as basic data will not be directly publicly available off the sequencing but people would like to first do their studies and once they are done with their project would like to publish this clearly we need kind of access control to data. We will also need to develop new software and tools and also common components ideally shared with other NFDIs but clearly there will be also tools that are dedicated for the analysis of let's say microbial data or omics data in general but also here we might need to invest in certain solutions. We also service monitoring service monitoring and reporting will be also relevant to see what is happening on the hardware and also to distribute these kind of things and maybe also generating software repositories for sharing these kind of components and maybe real CI CD infrastructure so that these kind of things are automatically distributed to the productive machines after testing and so on. But now the I would say the core piece after number one so in the end we would like to have a central hub inclusive research and discovery services where people can start with analytical services can be hosted there and again as part of an international network mostly a European network. We also would like to host a databases and transfer databases that may be existing already but that are not maintained. We will run terminology services to translate also metadata into between metadata. Ideally we can do data quality and provenance services or can run those in order to take care of good quality and check these kind of things and most importantly also the provenance that we see the different steps data under underwent in order to to get to an insight. The final data deposition and as mentioned we will not run or very unlikely run new repositories. There are some of those established already and we would like to help getting the data into those with the data that we have already and also long-term preservation is something that we would aim for especially for metadata that doesn't have repositories so far we would work on. Also that was a wish kind of the from the community it's also this goes a bit into data quality and provenance and reviewing and recommending system for data that we know what is actually good data and maybe even purely getting credits for having a very good data set and that's also very motivating and is increasing the standards for data in general. Often people are not handling a single type of data but also would like to for example do genomics put transcutimics on top would like to correlate with this with proteomics and maybe put some metabolomics on top of this and also this should be addressed and it should end up in in modeling that with kind of a systems perspective on on bacteria and other microbial species. Another topic that we see exploding basically in all research fields at least in the life sciences I have to say electronic lab notebooks and also mentioned before I'm saying this a lot I'm making a lot of connections to previous things. Electronic lab notebooks are kind of a key component where these kind of things can be recorded and then give them further downstream and the important part is again that we have here open standards that help to share this and make it possible to pass it downstream. And we have also inside of the consortium already a lot of experience with these kind of tools and can recommend their tools and maybe also run own ones but that all needs to be discussed. So as mentioned this is the core part I would say the other part I sometimes says the the dry part clearly we need project governance we need project financial controlling we need reporting and most importantly we also need dynamic adaptation scalability. It's pretty clear that the ideas that we have right now and that we are writing down our own a proposal that this will facing reality at some point and needs to be adapted and changed and this is also why we have these or intend to have these flexible funds in there to well yeah be able to to to work with the world out there in a few years. Then finally we have use cases here a few examples we have more but we are always happy to extend this and we will work with the participants also to to to get more of those actually written down. For example antibiotic resistance screening sorry antibiotic screening, biorectoomics, benchmarking of frameworks, clinical viral genomics, clinical I think I don't read all of those down here. The main aim is actually to have a concrete cases where we connect our participants to and also connect it to the measures that we would like to implement so basically having a cross-cutting network of measures where we can connect measures and and activities and the participants and other players in the game and that is also one thing where we are very happy if people see use cases they would like to like to go through with us that they can be edited here. Okay with this we are already coming to the end and the hour the first hour is already close to be over and that would be also the part where you get into the play and again thank you so much for for your time already now and also for the comments of Volker I think I own you a beer I would say and the the way you can contribute now already is if you if you interested in joined data as mentioned unfortunately due to the evaluation process we we are closed at least for the time being but I'm rather sure that we will very soon add more people again and you can contact us if you'd like to join. You can suggest use cases especially for participants this is still the way to contribute and we will anyway get closer to this again you can give feedback in any way and we have once with several structured ways of doing this now and we have already around or we had already a round of a questionnaire that was sending around and we will start a new round now again for I don't have the data precisely at hand until just you know you can help me I think 11th of September we said thank you very much so we will share the link here again and we will also spread it over Twitter and our website again so few if you want to give feedback here via the question a detailed feedback that is possible. What we will do now is well we have structures this in different ways but maybe we can also have a discussion here right now again but we will have the following option for you right now we will have basically a small poll so whoever is very short on time we still would love to get your very minimal feedback just single start a poll in a few seconds once I'm done here where you can basically rank our or your feedback regarding our task areas from one poor to five strong. We also have a pet so basically a collaborative working document where you can basically simply write what was good what was bad and you can pick whatever you want you can write this to one of task areas to any you can add a use case and additionally we'd like to start a discussion with you I can make one in the big around but I would rather quickly move then to breakout rooms the breakout rooms are smaller rooms where a smaller group of people can discuss we we know that not everybody is comfortable speaking in in larger groups and why we had already some people speaking here intensively we're rather sure that other voices also should be heard and this is why we would like to offer these breakout rooms where an always one or two of NFDI for micro voter members are located and are very happy to to get your suggestions. All right with this I would like to thank you so much for your time I hope we could answer already a lot of questions that were in your head before but again the breakout rooms are also there for for asking for answering your questions but also give your your feedback. We also have to thank FDM NRW for the support this is always great because they can yeah organize a lot of things here and that was very helpful. Please join us on Twitter we have information on the website also the questioner whoever has to leave now with the question the questioner will be also linked on our website again and with this I would say I stop here and again thank you very much.
 Okay, at first let me warmly welcome you.  It's great to have so many people here again and to discuss with you what we are and we  are NFDI for micro-blogger, what we intend to do.  We use this mostly as a way to communicate our ideas and current plan to you, but more  importantly also for you give us more feedback what is missing, where you might see gaps and  what we should improve.  A little bit of background, the proposal has to be handed in end of September, so we have  a little bit more than a month ahead of us and it will be definitely stressful and intensive,  but we still have ways or still have the option to adapt things and this is why we think having  your feedback right now is very useful for us and we thank all of you for being here  and hopefully sharing it then later your impressions in next practice.  We will start with a small slideshow that I've prepared and I will share my screen now.  Warm welcome here to the NFDI for micro-builder workshop.  We would like today, this is our fourth one, so this time we would like to show we actually  our work program, we had several of those meetings before and last time there was clearly  the wish we should go a little bit more into detail and describe what we want to do and  this is exactly what we will do today.  At first when we talk about community, so what is actually our community because micro-builder  seems sometimes not to be or is a rather broad term and just to specify who we are addressing  with this endeavor, we are basically talking to a broad range of people, a broad range  of researchers, so basically people from bacteriology but also virology, mycology,  protestology and also parasitology and I think we can combine these different communities  because they have certain things shared and also the member of NFDI for micro-builder  have backgrounds in all these fields so we hope to help all these communities that we  put now together into this larger community of microbiology.  The plan for today is the following, as not everybody is precisely aware, what is NFDI  and how this is meant to be, I would give again a short introduction to this, I try  to keep it short but this is sometimes needed because NFDI in general is rather different.  Then I will dive a little bit into NFDI for microbiota and our ideas and then we will  have a more detailed discussion of the work program, we will guide you through the different  points and you can already there ask us but otherwise we have as a fourth point, we have  a feedback plan where you ideally can tell us what was good, what is maybe missing and  we have this in different forms, for the ones who can unfortunately say only shortly, we  have a short poll, we have a pad where we can communicate and we also have short breakout  rooms or small breakout rooms where you can discuss in a smaller round what you see as  a good thing and maybe where you see some improvements.  Right, at first a little bit about the NFDI itself and there we have to go a little bit  further back even.  The Council for Scientific Information Infrastructure, RAD for Informations Infrastruktur was implemented  in 2014 by the Joint Science Conference and the aim is to give recommendations on a systematic  level, no implementations or on an operational level but really the high level recommendations  where, what the scientific community should do and how this can be guided or controlled  by a political level.  The recommendations that they came up with was to build a national research data infrastructure  NFDI, National Forschungsdateninfrastruktur and by this, well laying the foundation for  a new level of science ideally.  So it should be a German wide network of competences that are important, this is key, driven by  the scientific communities.  So it's not that infrastructure should be set up and then people might come but it should  be clear from the beginning on that this is driven by the scientific community.  And also they mentioned that it's important for this to change the type of funding that  we have sustainable structures here, not a project base as we know this usually but have  long term possibilities to maintain infrastructure.  And also the people should be changed or the different jobs required for this should be  established.  So data librarians, data scientists, data stewards, these kind of new job profiles should  be part of this change that basically help to improve the scientific or the research  process.  And this also means investment in minds, so it's less about building new infrastructure  but connecting available ones and to rather put the money into the development of new  stuff and different operations of research data management and services.  In the end what is expected to happen or what is wished to happen is a fundamental change  of the scientific culture to interconnect it, an open culture that exists in parts already  but that is not there where it could be so far.  And it is pretty clear that such a transition takes long and the estimate is 15 to 20 years.  So we see that the NFDI itself is a rather different beast than let's say a normal project  to run but it's actually a fundamental change inside of the research community and that  will take quite a while.  The joint science conference decided to fund that research data infrastructure and with  roughly 90 million euros per year until 2028 and 90% is coming from the federal government  and 10% from the states and I will tell this later on this already has already started.  The gaps to fill and the tasks to do are the following, this is at least what was suggested,  define common standards which is often lacking and due to this exchange of data for example  is much harder, development of new methods to evaluate data, enable subsequent use of  data so better sharing and reuse basically and identify demands for research data management  to improve them later on but also general community building in order to share best  practices and also to form a governance structure.  So this should happen inside of these different consortia so the NFDI should be built by different  consortia but in the end it should be one single NFDI if you see like this so interaction  is very important here as well.  Can we ask questions or questions later?  Yes please, no you can do this already now if you like.  This is Falker, thanks for letting me ask.  I hope you guys are not distracted by the plane so I'm wondering about defined common  standards the first point on your current slide because it seems to me like there is  already an abundance of standards out there and it's really the actually proper use of  the proper standards that's lacking and it's tools for standards that help us do the things  that we all know we ought to do which is not doing for several various reasons actually.  So can you comment on that?  Yeah sure, I mean you're absolutely right and inventing a new standard doesn't help  anyone so there are definitely gaps where these standards are missing but under this  umbrella I would also put what you basically said and the spread of the available standards  and maybe also one word in terms of standards clearly there should be not a German standard  or it doesn't make sense to have national standards but that it's very important that  this is basically done on an international level and we will see this later.  We have people inside of NFDI for micro-voter that are experienced working on these kind  of committees.  So we have clearly a need for developing you once but also the task is to bring this to  the people and this is also what NFDI for micro-voter and general all NFDI consortia  are aiming to do basically looking around what is there and how can we implement this  in our infrastructure and how can we also teach this to people.  Thank you.  Yeah okay thank you very much.  The selection and evaluation of the different consortia happened and will happen by the  DFG it's a strictly scientific process but the final decision is then made by the joint  science conference and clearly expert committees are formed that are basically looking at this  and looking for the different aspects of this and we have a look at these aspects in a few  slides but first to mention the application or the funding happens in three rounds so  the first round was already last year the autumn of last year the first set of consortia  and in their proposals and they got meanwhile their response and started basically or will  start in autumn now and then there is the second round and we will apply for the second  round basically this autumn as mentioned and then there will be a third round in 2021 so  next year basically.  The aim is that in the end there are around 30 consortia roughly speaking and currently  it looks really like this number seems to be rather realistic and it's about 70 million  projects cost plus funding and overhead and so on so roughly this 85 to 90 million and  basically between five and two and five million funding per consortium I think roughly it's  three if you divide this properly and that's roughly what it's aimed for so basically let's  speak roughly of three million euros per year per consortium for around five years.  Exactly the funding period is for five years clearly the aim is to extend this later on  but we will start basically with five years and basically there is a topical or methodological  focus there are a few cross cutting consortia that are already formed this and in principle  NFDI is also the result of this we started as NFDI for life that still exists as NFDI  for life umbrella but those cross cutting consortias were not allowed to apply so far  that might happen next year but clearly this is an important part connecting the different  communities later on.  The criteria for the selection of these consortias are the readiness and relevance of the consortium  and the research data management strategy and also the structure itself and viability.  Yeah with all this background and we can actually even stop here if you have any questions already  regarding NFDI and the formation of consortia I wanted to keep this rather short but still  as this kind of special I wanted to give a very short background here seems to be not  the case so I will continue with them NFDI from my quota and specific.  I guess I don't have to tell this to people here in the call but still I need to make  the point here microbial species and viral particles are affecting us basically everywhere  they are influencing our health and I think the last month of the corona pandemic made  it pretty clear that we need to take care of this we're still facing a lot of issues  regarding antibiotic resistance and many other things basically a lot of diseases are caused  by this also our gut microbiome and microbiome on other parts of our body are crucial for  our survival and our health so that's pretty clear but what is often neglected is the strong  impact actually on the whole ecosystem that basically the majority of the biomass out  there are actually microbes and that all our food webs and our climate itself are influenced  and are influencing microbiota and due to this we need a deep deep and broad understanding  of these organisms since basically the beginning of humankind we are also using microbes for  food production and in agriculture so they are key components in in this and this is  why we need to understand this and meanwhile also lots of chemicals and vaccines on our  generated on a biotechnological manner again understanding microbes here is a key is a key  to a successful establishment of these kind of technologies so I would say it's it's  indoubtable that microbes are of higher relevance for human beings and the society in general  but I said I guess everybody knows this year still one thing to keep in mind is that scientific  advances or the advance of science is always bound to technologies and if you look at this  image here some might recognize this this is the one of the first microscopes developed  and that was a game changer because suddenly we could see the small living beings there  and this basically changed how we could perceive the world and could do science today we have  again a change of tools and not not sure if everybody is recognizing this but this is  basically a bunch of sequencing machines and VGI so today we have a lot of technologies  high super technologies that we can basically with a push of a button generate terabytes  of data and that is at first very good this means we we can perform science in a much  more efficient way than than we did this before decades ago and we can basically generate  a vast set of data easily well but the critical point is now translating this data into really  insights terabyte of data doesn't help us because this is not not a solution to the  problems that we're facing and this translation of data and insights is basically the scientific  process and we think we we can do this better so there are common common challenges that  researchers in microbiology are facing when they need to translate basically data into  insights and in general on a very basic level is already the missing data management and  I'm a bioinformatician by myself and I you know I had this rather often that people with  a with a hard drive came to me or told me are can you please shortly download this from  there and then a few years later they asked me oh do you have still the data because I've  lost it and I've looked at where it is right now so maybe you have it somewhere I usually  have it somewhere because I have a certain data management but still this is a fundamental  skill that we need to give people and provide infrastructure to people to and there's often  missing basically once you have your data somewhere in place and you want to start then people  often recognize afterwards oh okay I did now let's say sequencing or a proteomics but  I've no way of translating this into things that I can handle so a bioinformatic expertise  is often required and missing once you have a terabyte of data lying around you might  also recognize well this cannot be necessarily crunched on my little laptop here but I need  a little bit more computational infrastructure I need a server and I need ways of storing  things in there and I need to need to have software for do not this and that can be also  a hampering part sometimes we do not have to generate new data but sometimes we just  need to find data that is already generated for different purposes the problem is that  there is a poor findability and this is kind of connected to the to the point below lack  of metadata because if there are no metadata or metadata standards that needs to describe  our data much better then it's very hard to go towards for find this and if we have a  rich set and enforce this rich set of metadata connected to our data we can look for studies  that did different things maybe from a different perspective but that can be integrated into  our study that we want to run and by this principle making science much more efficient  and much more cost effective and this is also then here limited access and reuse of data  often high throughput analysis are done for example but the data is not necessarily available  or again the metadata is not given there luckily we see at least the trend in there  but still not everybody knows how to make data accessible in a proper fashion and another  thing is that often with a lot of manual creation databases are generated for example  in a PhD project and then as soon as the PhD leaves the lab this these kind of database  are not maintained anymore and we see this kind of data rods and they see loss of very  valuable data and information out there so these are a few common challenges that we  see independent of the field in microbiology and that we would like to address and where  we want to make science better and frictionless and seamless basically so that we have this  kind of easy translation from insights into from data into insights.  Konrad, is this the first one again? Sorry, you went back to the previous one.  So I mean I read this slide and I have to apologize because I'm obviously new to this  consortium and new to Germany again so I'm wondering about reading this slide because  all of this is my friend friends at the EBI they would just say okay this is what we do.  Yeah, and you're absolutely right and we'll see later we are exactly talking with the  EBI regarding this so basically they highly appreciate it that we approach them in order  then being did you talk to Guy Cochran or were you talking to him?  No, we talked to Oeth Upweiler so basically and so basically we are on a very high level  there and we basically offered that we bring this to the German community because you're  absolutely right it's and we do not want to basically reinvent the wheel and start new  repositories for example and the complete opposite actually we want to look what is out there  or we know what is out there and want to guide the community to make better use of that.  So I really appreciate your question here and absolutely agree that we basically solve  things that are partially solved not everything but that are partially solved but the solution  that we provide is basically bring this to the microbiological community that is often  not doing this because these practices are kind of neglected and I can say this from  my own experience here maybe I have different ones but it's pretty often pretty much the  case that these kind of things are hampering.  No I happen to agree I think there's a lot of there's a lot of airspace between where  Guy Cochran who's the person at EBI doing this working for directly for Oeth Upweiler  is and where usual the customers are usually and there is a translation layer missing and  what what you're saying is you're positioning yourself as a translation layer between EBI  services and that sounds great okay.  Exactly, exactly.  Thank you very much and again please feel free to interrupt me thank you Falka for being  a good example how to do this here thank you.  So our vision in general is that microbiologists and researchers from related fields can translate  research data easily into a deep understanding of microbial species and their interaction  on a molecular level so I read this and now a little bit more interpretation in principle  we would like to take the friction out of the system.  I mentioned this before often people generate data in one place then carry it on a hard drive  to another place then stuff gets lost then they put it on one server we need to go somewhere  else need to do analysis on this machine and then on that machine in the end they want  to publish this and need to upload it somewhere else we want to take this friction out of the  system make it much much easier for the scientific community basically to translate this data  into insights and also independent of your your background so if you think let's say  if you think in microbiome analysis so consortia of different species this is something that  you can do as a medical doctor who is doing maybe some research and has some samples that  he or she would like to analyze or you can do this as somebody who is trying to study  oceans and the the procedure is pretty much the same but the question the questions that  you're asking are rather different and sometimes there are even not your core questions but  they are connected to what you're looking at so also these kind of related fields that  I as I mentioned here would really profit from this kind of approach.  Our mission as NFDI for microbiota is actually act as a central hub and support the community  with access to data and also services data and metadata standards but also training basically  helping people to help themselves with these kind of things.  Coming to the consortia and we are kind of active since 2018 as mentioned we work hard  in the beginning of NFDI for life umbrella and we still are connected to that but we  extended since since that time so we have 10 so-called co-applicants and applicants  so basically ZFB Med is the applicant but the others are so-called co-applicants this  is the official speak here basically so the vocabulary so we are 10 of applicants co-applicants  and as you can see we have a very broad background starting from infrastructure providers to  universities to institutions dedicated to to this field and with this we have a well a  broad spectrum of technologies available of capabilities of expertise and also a broad  network inside the community so I would say we are definitely part of that microbial community.  We also have participants and basically unfortunately you see this at the very bottom we had to  close the list for the time being and that is mostly something to do with the evaluation  process so August 15th was the deadline to handle in a letter of intent for the NFDI application  and that was basically the the line to draw who's in and who's not who's in right now  I would say because clearly the intention is to to use the infrastructure developed here  and the solutions and to roll them out to a large fraction of the scientific community.  Still in the beginning we needed to be limited to a certain set and that was basically the  line to draw and we have now around 50 participating institutions and networks and this includes  3DFG priority programs, 3DFG collaborative research centers, one plus of excellence and  we also have the next generation sequencing competence center which is also funded by  the DFG as participants. The participants I've not written this in here but they are coming  from all larger societies so basically communities we have people from universities, we have Max  Plank in there, we have Leipzig in there, we have Helmholtz in here, we have Fraunhofer in there  and basically a broad mixture in terms of topics we have bacteriologists, we have people working  on archaea, we have people working on viral particles, we have people working on parasites,  we have people working on algae so we have I guess everybody in the boat to have a I would say a  little bit more than a very good test balloon and to establish these kind of approaches that we are thinking of.  We also have supporting societies so basically the four I would say large societies VAM and DHTM for the  bacterial and also archaeal people, we have the parasite people involved and we have also the viral  society involved so with this we also think that we have a good standing inside of the community  and importantly address what people want, it doesn't make sense to come up with our solutions  that might be not needed by the different researchers but in the end we want to establish  this channel to the communities in different fashions in order to fill gaps that people see.  Putting this all on a map not the societies but basically all our co-applicants participating  in institutions, networks and SPPs and SFPs we see we also all over Germany located and  think we have a rather good standing here again and this coming a little bit into  into Falker's question we also have international partners and networks we want to mention a few  here due to Denbi we are part of LXC or contribute to LXC, clearly one big thing  on the horizon or actually more than on the horizon but pretty close now is the European  open science cloud EOSC, you've seen we have EMBL in the boat and EMBL or one outstation of  EMBL is EMBL EBI and we are in close contact as Falker mentioned already they have a lot of solutions  at hand and we basically want to be the interface to the German community and they really appreciate  it that we would like to go in this direction. There are other initiatives like from GoFair,  the fair microbiome and other networks implementation networks that we are interacting with and also  for example the NCCR microbiomes from Switzerland's contact with us already and you see we you saw the  the members or basically the co-applicants and you know we are very well connected inside the  European international network and that is crucial. I mentioned this already before having let's say  German standards doesn't make sense it also doesn't make sense to start new repositories for let's say  sequencing data instead we are the local representatives to help people using this  infrastructure that is out there and filling that gap in order to well make science on international  level happening and science is always something that is global and cannot be  national and that was by the way if I was not involved but at least this was a little bit  reported the F so the national in NFDI was always a little bit debated because well research  cannot happen only locally. Yeah then we have a small slide on that roughly  displays the governance interactions that we that we are considering. We and let's let's maybe focus  on the important part here so we are going to a step to the scientific board that is basically  represented by the societies and also by international partners but also clearly we have a user council  that is formed by participants in our user community clearly we need to interact with the  NFDI directorate and that is one thing that was just recently established so basically  this is infrastructure that we can build upon now and also in terms of contracts and all these  kind of things we will not basically have a need a new association for this so this will be all  under the umbrella of the NFDI directorate as centrally. Clearly we also will interact with  other consortia I will dive into this in a second and clearly we try to integrate the data generators  as mentioned we have the four sequencing centers involved but many of our participants have also  sequencing centers or proteomics centers or other omics technologies at hand and there we can  or this can be used as kind of a test balloon and or more to to establish this kind of workflows  and the data handling and also the teaching and training there. Conrad is a question sorry  sorry sorry I seem to be the only person asking question. I highly appreciate that please. I feel  really awkward I owe you beer whenever we meet. No no. So how does how does one become a  microbeauty service center? Yeah in principle those service centers are mainly meant to be  given or hosted by by the applicants and co-op applicants but in principle there is no limitation  that a participant can cannot do that and we as other consortia we will also ask for flex funds  so flexible funds that can be allocated and given also to participants in order to actually  give or provide a certain service and that that should help us also to fill gaps that we are not  aware of and or not yet aware of that basically come up with a new technology is established or  something like this and we are aiming now for five years and maybe even beyond that and clearly  being agile and able to adapt to new needs is is crucial and there are also other  members of the community so basically participants could become such a service center and could  establish a service as such. So basically coming back to your question if you have a good idea that  is missing or if you see something that we have not included so far please contact us and we we  can see how this fits into our image there and that might be also something that is maybe not  possible right now but that's something that is happening after a few years when we when we know  that the base needs are covered and then new services for example need to be established.  This is why we wrote here at the bottom and for micro-border members and not necessarily only  the applicants and co-op applicants because in principle also participants that we see as  member of that could contribute. Can I maybe interject? Yes please. Right so maybe this comes  later I don't know maybe you could go into a bit more specifics of what we're talking about here in  terms of kind of compute centers hardware and such because all of the discussions tend to happen on a  somewhat higher level like how can we integrate how can we analyze I think the very first step  needs to be like how do we manage the data and what's the actual physical hardware that does this?  I can answer this already here we have a little bit like this later in the task areas  but one core part or one core idea was and I mentioned this in the beginning was that  the money should go into people basically and not to I have not mentioned there but not into  hardware so there will be no funding for hardware as such and this is in the beginning sounds a  little bit awkward but NFDI is basically meant to be a networking endeavor so it's mostly that the  things that are out there should be better used and due to the networking of the different  notes inside of the community the improvement should happen. Clearly this won't be enough  and basically the NFDI is one part of it and EOSC is the other part so I guess there will be  complementary funding happening or needed actually to do this. What you will see later on  but I can do this here right now we have Denbi so the German  bioinformatics infrastructure here and on board and that is for example the hardware that we'll  use in the beginning and where already certain services are around. Maybe another question from  my side. Yes please. The NFDI is called microbiota but it looks like that it's purely sequencing.  To implement other technologies like proteomics, metabolomics,  cultureomics whatever in this field to really to address the question of microbiota.  No you're absolutely right and I'm not sure if I state this somewhere down there and we are not  limited to sequencing and I mentioned this in the beginning already also other databases that  might be of use are useful and we have actually it's a good point I'm not sure if I put this into  the slides but it's also in our abstracts and we are not limited to sequencing we also have people  with those proteomics background, metabolomics and we also have people with a biotechnology  background to also put these kind of things into the game and only focusing on sequencing would  be definitely not enough. I completely agree also we aim to interact with other consortia regarding  imaging data for example so it's so much more than only sequencing. Sorry if I made this  impression but it's definitely beyond that so thank you very much for the point here.  Anything else that would like to kind of? Yeah let me ask another question since I'm in a habit  of doing that. Yeah go for it. So I'm naive now okay I have a new aluminum machine it yields  four terabases per run where does my hardware go where does my uh my fast queue files go?  Who runs the analysis pipeline? Where does the data get stored? Those are questions that almost  immediately come to my mind. Is this something that this project is about or is that okay? Yeah  we aim to address that exactly but the crucial part is actually that before you sequence a single base  that your metadata is properly annotated and stored. This is actually the one of the key things  that we try to interact with the data generators and help them to enforce certain standards in  terms of metadata that are then stored by us and also the data ideally is stored by us additionally  so that they ideally. Sorry can I ask yeah let me get that so I mean you know my background right  you know this is what I've done that doesn't seem to be a working proposal because you're  basically following the model that that EBI is failing at and NCBI are failing at where you  require metadata to be stored centrally prior to submission of sequences and this model has been  proven not to work over and over again. Yeah because you don't have the mentor and the issue is  usually the case the problems usually usually that the scientists themselves are not very keen on  putting metadata into this and this is where data stewards and data librarians come into the game.  So basically by educating this this kind of new jobs these new kind of roles that are sysed in the  connection of metadata and consultancy of that and we try to overcome that issue and also one  thing also that it's local and basically if you are kind of well forced to add this metadata then  then you have well higher motivation to really enter these kind of things but again data quality  and checking of this needs manpower and this is exactly what we want to put into the game.  I'm not sure I follow I have to admit so it's the plan to have decentralized curators at basically  every site because it seems to me like the reason we don't have data curators is because data curators  don't scale. They don't scale but this is why you need to invest in them and it's still important  so you train the scientists themselves the researchers themselves but you additionally give  support by professional data curators data stewards that are helping to improve that situation.  Interesting so let me comment on this from the perspective of the international  metadata community because the GSC has basically analyzed the same problem or the same sphere and  we've come to the conclusion and I'm their executive board that the solution here is not manpower but  software. Which is one part of the whole thing clearly but you need also support it's both sides  clearly and basically having an infrastructure that is assisting here and also holding all that  information later on and also putting this into into a discovery service and so on that that's  all part of it that we would like to establish but I think the software alone is not solving that  but it's it's it's part of the solution. Maybe I could add something to that. So we are one of  those data generators so we are one of four national sequencing centers and there are certain  things that we can do that are otherwise a bit difficult to achieve so when a customer requests  a sequencing project with us they would then be able to say this is something that should go into  the NFDI infrastructure and we would then be able to automatically capture a whole range of metadata  that is otherwise very annoying to produce like what sequencer, what library kits, what read length,  all of that stuff. What we will not be able to do obviously is all the biological metadata. Where  was this sampled? What organism is this? So there's obviously still a gap but at least some parts of  the metadata should be then we're talking about software I guess. Yeah exactly yeah so ideally  this falls all out of your limbs or even your electronic laptop notebook and you see later on  that these kind of things are also addressed by us. It's also kind of changing the culture that was  a point I made very early and the culture also means the whole scientific workflow.  For example if journals are requesting as they do now more and more you have to put your data there  but if they are also requesting the metadata then we have a good leverage to motivate people  doing that and I know that it's extra effort. This is why having dedicated people working on this  is crucial. I don't say it's easy, I really don't say it's easy but it's part of an approach  that has different facets and we try to address all of those in here. It's definitely a challenge  as it was before if you just give people the raw sequencing data and then tell them  go upload it to EVI. I don't think that works and I guess that's also what this is kind of  boiling down to and we're sort of trying to take that away this sort of initial barrier and saying  your sequence with us will take care of the submission and then you just have to fill out  this Excel sheet essentially and then we can track all of that as one submission and make it  automatic in a sense. Exactly and not enter into it also several times right that you do this once  and we're taking care of this metadata and pass it on and once the project is in the state of  publication this kind of stuff can be directly given then to the central infrastructure in EVI  or even NCBI if needed. By the way this is referred to as the metagenome registry,  something we implemented with EVI a couple years back. It's a bunch of basically JSON that you  need to work against. I'm still unclear as to the number of data curators we're talking about.  Are these basically for the, you mentioned a limited number of data generators or are they basically  limited to four or is there a larger number? Yeah no it's not a large number so far but this  should be also compensated by training. It's basically central organized and not unfortunately  not each sequence in the center will have somebody available like this. This is unfortunately not  possible in this funding scheme if you boil it down what needs to be done there. But again hopefully  this can be extended so we see this more as a starting point to showcase all that and then  in terms of other funding getting more human power into the boat.  But I really like the discussion so I'm very happy for further questions and that's also  crucial right for us to get your feedback and as I said it won't be easy and it won't happen you  know just by pushing a button it will be a long and dry path. I'm rather sure but I think it's  worth walking this and if you have experience with this we're very happy to build upon those.  Okay then I would say I would continue here. There is the so-called  Leipzig Berlin Declaration for Crosscutting Topics that is part of let's say the NFDI  community in general and we also signed that so we are also very happy to work together on these  topics and share our opinions and also put even some energy into this and working on this together.  More importantly we have bi-directional agreements with different consortia on very different topics  where we would like to work together and have a heavy exchange in different fields that can be  based on standards but that can be also technical infrastructure and several of our co-applicants  are also members of different consortia so it makes also sense to use common infrastructure  and basically leverage the synergies and clearly we are still open for further interactions with  other and maybe upcoming NFDI consortia and if you think back microboter are a basic found  area so it is crucial also on a scientific level to interact on these kind of things together.  All right so the planned work program in a rough overview consists of these  five task areas plus we have something which is called the use cases which they see connecting  all these kind of things and I would like to go slowly with you through the different  measures that we have. Let's face it the most interesting one is number four still the other  ones are of relevance but number four are the well number one and number four are the ones that are  closest to the people and are the actual things for the research community. So let's start clearly  we need to do outreach in order to make people aware of this and by that avoid kind of double work  and also get input by other people who have already experienced this. The connection to other  NFDI consortia as mentioned is strongly ongoing and that's also very important to avoid reinventing  the wheel several times and also the connection to international partners as mentioned before is  crucial in order to have an international solution in terms of technologies but also  standards and maybe also not actually maybe but also on the level of training. Clearly we need to  do also some public relations that's very common but we also need to communicate into politics  what we need and that is something that we actually saw a lot also in the recent month in terms of  Covid because there were different funding or there was different funding happening  interestingly very little on the omics level and on high throughput data but I think if we can  establish a link to there we can also make them better understand how research is happening today  and what kind of things are required. And last and definitely not least is training education  in support. This is actually very crucial that this is maybe one thing that we can start very  early because in the end we need to invest basically in minds as it was actually demanded  and having a deep understanding of the problems that high throughput technologies bring and what  kind of requirements are there and what is actually today good scientific practice is crucial. We have  in the consortium several people who are very strong in the training aspect and we would like  to use this network to bring this to many more people interested in basic data analysis but also  good data management and everything in this direction. Standards and policies who mentioned  this already before it's crucial to work on that. There are often already standards out there but  it's also very important to look around how this can be brought to the people in the end and how to  kind of enforce it. I would say force people to use it but to enforce the implementation of those  in the different systems and by that removing a lot of friction and make movement of data  and metadata easy and by that also improving this whole work process of scientists. We mentioned  this again also before. Ideally you enter your metadata once or ideally the metadata is actually  recorded by the machines then given downstream and building on these standards is basically  crucial and sometimes unfortunately there are no standards and they first have to be developed  and that would be also part. Similar thing is also even before the actual recording happens  as a piece for experimental procedures and how they can be recorded would be also one thing that we  would work on. Standards of workflows and tools there are things like CWL so common  workflow language and so on that are things that we would like to support and extend  and also implement in our structure. Also the development of policies for data management  and publication sharing. I mentioned this that is kind of important to make clear that a publication  should not look like how like it looks looked before let's say decades ago but that today  publications must be much more transparent and we luckily have the means for doing this so  there should be the data available there should be code available there should be also provenance  of the data described. It should be pretty clear how we came from the original experiment to the  measurement to the insights that were generated and that should be all part of publication and  that should be shared and also here we see as a gap into the microbial community we come from  let's say a very strong open access and open science background we all were fighting for  fair data since many years already and basically here we want to be the translator for these kind of  concepts and policies into the community. And legal policies and legal issues are here also  important regarding licenses also here often a lot of training is also needed and people are not  aware what kind of licenses they should use can use in order to make sharing of data possible  and what kind of data they can actually reuse again. Okay then the technical infrastructure  as said this is maybe something people are not so much interfacing with directly but still it's  super important so the computational infrastructure operations itself as mentioned we are heavily  building on Denby which is in my opinion is very successful and unique network that is the  foundation not only for us but also for other NFDIs and that's a great foundation for the work here.  We will also need to go further into data storage services including management and access control  as basic data will not be directly publicly available off the sequencing but people would  like to first do their studies and once they are done with their project would like to publish this  clearly we need kind of access control to data. We will also need to develop new software and  tools and also common components ideally shared with other NFDIs but clearly there will be also  tools that are dedicated for the analysis of let's say microbial data or omics data in general  but also here we might need to invest in certain solutions. We also service monitoring  service monitoring and reporting will be also relevant to see what is happening on the hardware  and also to distribute these kind of things and maybe also generating software repositories for  sharing these kind of components and maybe real CI CD infrastructure so that these kind of things  are automatically distributed to the productive machines after testing and so on. But now the I  would say the core piece after number one so in the end we would like to have a central hub inclusive  research and discovery services where people can start with analytical services can be  hosted there and again as part of an international network mostly a European network. We also would  like to host a databases and transfer databases that may be existing already but that are not  maintained. We will run terminology services to translate also metadata into between metadata.  Ideally we can do data quality and provenance services or can run those in order to take care of  good quality and check these kind of things and most importantly also the provenance that we see the  different steps data under underwent in order to to get to an insight. The final data deposition and  as mentioned we will not run or very unlikely run new repositories. There are some of those  established already and we would like to help getting the data into those with the data that we  have already and also long-term preservation is something that we would aim for especially for  metadata that doesn't have repositories so far we would work on. Also that was a wish kind of  the from the community it's also this goes a bit into data quality and provenance and  reviewing and recommending system for data that we know what is actually good data and maybe even  purely getting credits for having a very good data set and that's also very motivating and  is increasing the standards for data in general. Often people are not handling a single type of  data but also would like to for example do genomics put transcutimics on top would like to correlate  with this with proteomics and maybe put some metabolomics on top of this and also this should  be addressed and it should end up in in modeling that with kind of a systems perspective on on  bacteria and other microbial species. Another topic that we see exploding basically in all  research fields at least in the life sciences I have to say electronic lab notebooks and also  mentioned before I'm saying this a lot I'm making a lot of connections to previous things.  Electronic lab notebooks are kind of a key component where these kind of things can be  recorded and then give them further downstream and the important part is again that we have  here open standards that help to share this and make it possible to pass it downstream.  And we have also inside of the consortium already a lot of experience with these kind of  tools and can recommend their tools and maybe also run own ones but that all needs to be discussed.  So as mentioned this is the core part I would say the other part I sometimes says the the dry part  clearly we need project governance we need project financial controlling we need reporting  and most importantly we also need dynamic adaptation scalability. It's pretty clear that  the ideas that we have right now and that we are writing down our own a proposal that this will  facing reality at some point and needs to be adapted and changed and this is also why we have  these or intend to have these flexible funds in there to well yeah be able to to to work with  the world out there in a few years. Then finally we have use cases here a few examples we have  more but we are always happy to extend this and we will work with the participants also to  to to get more of those actually written down. For example antibiotic resistance screening sorry  antibiotic screening, biorectoomics, benchmarking of frameworks, clinical viral genomics, clinical  I think I don't read all of those down here. The main aim is actually to have a concrete cases  where we connect our participants to and also connect it to the measures that we would like  to implement so basically having a cross-cutting network of measures where we can connect measures  and and activities and the participants and other players in the game and that is also one thing  where we are very happy if people see use cases they would like to like to go through with us  that they can be edited here. Okay with this we are already coming to the end and the hour the  first hour is already close to be over and that would be also the part where you get into the  play and again thank you so much for for your time already now and also for the comments of  Volker I think I own you a beer I would say and the the way you can contribute now already  is if you if you interested in joined data as mentioned unfortunately due to the evaluation  process we we are closed at least for the time being but I'm rather sure that we will very soon  add more people again and you can contact us if you'd like to join. You can suggest use cases  especially for participants this is still the way to contribute and we will anyway get closer to  this again you can give feedback in any way and we have once with several structured ways of doing  this now and we have already around or we had already a round of a questionnaire that was  sending around and we will start a new round now again for I don't have the data precisely at hand  until just you know you can help me I think 11th of September we said thank you very much so we  will share the link here again and we will also spread it over Twitter and our website again so  few if you want to give feedback here via the question a detailed feedback that is possible.  What we will do now is well we have structures this in different ways but maybe we can also have  a discussion here right now again but we will have the following option for you right now we will  have basically a small poll so whoever is very short on time we still would love to get your  very minimal feedback just single start a poll in a few seconds once I'm done here where you can  basically rank our or your feedback regarding our task areas from one poor to five strong.  We also have a pet so basically a collaborative working document where you can basically simply  write what was good what was bad and you can pick whatever you want you can write this to one of  task areas to any you can add a use case and additionally we'd like to start a discussion  with you I can make one in the big around but I would rather quickly move then to breakout rooms  the breakout rooms are smaller rooms where a smaller group of people can discuss we we know  that not everybody is comfortable speaking in in larger groups and why we had already some people  speaking here intensively we're rather sure that other voices also should be heard and this is why  we would like to offer these breakout rooms where an always one or two of NFDI for micro voter members  are located and are very happy to to get your suggestions.  All right with this I would like to thank you so much for your time I hope we could  answer already a lot of questions that were in your head before but again the breakout rooms  are also there for for asking for answering your questions but also give your your feedback.  We also have to thank FDM NRW for the support this is always great because they can yeah organize  a lot of things here and that was very helpful. Please join us on Twitter we have information  on the website also the questioner whoever has to leave now with the question the questioner  will be also linked on our website again and with this I would say I stop here  and again thank you very much.
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Okay, at first let me warmly welcome you. It's great to have so many people here again and to discuss with you what we are and we are NFDI for micro-blogger, what we intend to do. We use this mostly as a way to communicate our ideas and current plan to you, but more importantly also for you give us more feedback what is missing, where you might see gaps and what we should improve. A little bit of background, the proposal has to be handed in end of September, so we have a little bit more than a month ahead of us and it will be definitely stressful and intensive, but we still have ways or still have the option to adapt things and this is why we think having your feedback right now is very useful for us and we thank all of you for being here and hopefully sharing it then later your impressions in next practice. We will start with a small slideshow that I've prepared and I will share my screen now. Warm welcome here to the NFDI for micro-builder workshop. We would like today, this is our fourth one, so this time we would like to show we actually our work program, we had several of those meetings before and last time there was clearly the wish we should go a little bit more into detail and describe what we want to do and this is exactly what we will do today. At first when we talk about community, so what is actually our community because micro-builder seems sometimes not to be or is a rather broad term and just to specify who we are addressing with this endeavor, we are basically talking to a broad range of people, a broad range of researchers, so basically people from bacteriology but also virology, mycology, protestology and also parasitology and I think we can combine these different communities because they have certain things shared and also the member of NFDI for micro-builder have backgrounds in all these fields so we hope to help all these communities that we put now together into this larger community of microbiology. The plan for today is the following, as not everybody is precisely aware, what is NFDI and how this is meant to be, I would give again a short introduction to this, I try to keep it short but this is sometimes needed because NFDI in general is rather different. Then I will dive a little bit into NFDI for microbiota and our ideas and then we will have a more detailed discussion of the work program, we will guide you through the different points and you can already there ask us but otherwise we have as a fourth point, we have a feedback plan where you ideally can tell us what was good, what is maybe missing and we have this in different forms, for the ones who can unfortunately say only shortly, we have a short poll, we have a pad where we can communicate and we also have short breakout rooms or small breakout rooms where you can discuss in a smaller round what you see as a good thing and maybe where you see some improvements. Right, at first a little bit about the NFDI itself and there we have to go a little bit further back even. The Council for Scientific Information Infrastructure, RAD for Informations Infrastruktur was implemented in 2014 by the Joint Science Conference and the aim is to give recommendations on a systematic level, no implementations or on an operational level but really the high level recommendations where, what the scientific community should do and how this can be guided or controlled by a political level. The recommendations that they came up with was to build a national research data infrastructure NFDI, National Forschungsdateninfrastruktur and by this, well laying the foundation for a new level of science ideally. So it should be a German wide network of competences that are important, this is key, driven by the scientific communities. So it's not that infrastructure should be set up and then people might come but it should be clear from the beginning on that this is driven by the scientific community. And also they mentioned that it's important for this to change the type of funding that we have sustainable structures here, not a project base as we know this usually but have long term possibilities to maintain infrastructure. And also the people should be changed or the different jobs required for this should be established. So data librarians, data scientists, data stewards, these kind of new job profiles should be part of this change that basically help to improve the scientific or the research process. And this also means investment in minds, so it's less about building new infrastructure but connecting available ones and to rather put the money into the development of new stuff and different operations of research data management and services. In the end what is expected to happen or what is wished to happen is a fundamental change of the scientific culture to interconnect it, an open culture that exists in parts already but that is not there where it could be so far. And it is pretty clear that such a transition takes long and the estimate is 15 to 20 years. So we see that the NFDI itself is a rather different beast than let's say a normal project to run but it's actually a fundamental change inside of the research community and that will take quite a while. The joint science conference decided to fund that research data infrastructure and with roughly 90 million euros per year until 2028 and 90% is coming from the federal government and 10% from the states and I will tell this later on this already has already started. The gaps to fill and the tasks to do are the following, this is at least what was suggested, define common standards which is often lacking and due to this exchange of data for example is much harder, development of new methods to evaluate data, enable subsequent use of data so better sharing and reuse basically and identify demands for research data management to improve them later on but also general community building in order to share best practices and also to form a governance structure. So this should happen inside of these different consortia so the NFDI should be built by different consortia but in the end it should be one single NFDI if you see like this so interaction is very important here as well. Can we ask questions or questions later? Yes please, no you can do this already now if you like. This is Falker, thanks for letting me ask. I hope you guys are not distracted by the plane so I'm wondering about defined common standards the first point on your current slide because it seems to me like there is already an abundance of standards out there and it's really the actually proper use of the proper standards that's lacking and it's tools for standards that help us do the things that we all know we ought to do which is not doing for several various reasons actually. So can you comment on that? Yeah sure, I mean you're absolutely right and inventing a new standard doesn't help anyone so there are definitely gaps where these standards are missing but under this umbrella I would also put what you basically said and the spread of the available standards and maybe also one word in terms of standards clearly there should be not a German standard or it doesn't make sense to have national standards but that it's very important that this is basically done on an international level and we will see this later. We have people inside of NFDI for micro-voter that are experienced working on these kind of committees. So we have clearly a need for developing you once but also the task is to bring this to the people and this is also what NFDI for micro-voter and general all NFDI consortia are aiming to do basically looking around what is there and how can we implement this in our infrastructure and how can we also teach this to people. Thank you. Yeah okay thank you very much. The selection and evaluation of the different consortia happened and will happen by the DFG it's a strictly scientific process but the final decision is then made by the joint science conference and clearly expert committees are formed that are basically looking at this and looking for the different aspects of this and we have a look at these aspects in a few slides but first to mention the application or the funding happens in three rounds so the first round was already last year the autumn of last year the first set of consortia and in their proposals and they got meanwhile their response and started basically or will start in autumn now and then there is the second round and we will apply for the second round basically this autumn as mentioned and then there will be a third round in 2021 so next year basically. The aim is that in the end there are around 30 consortia roughly speaking and currently it looks really like this number seems to be rather realistic and it's about 70 million projects cost plus funding and overhead and so on so roughly this 85 to 90 million and basically between five and two and five million funding per consortium I think roughly it's three if you divide this properly and that's roughly what it's aimed for so basically let's speak roughly of three million euros per year per consortium for around five years. Exactly the funding period is for five years clearly the aim is to extend this later on but we will start basically with five years and basically there is a topical or methodological focus there are a few cross cutting consortia that are already formed this and in principle NFDI is also the result of this we started as NFDI for life that still exists as NFDI for life umbrella but those cross cutting consortias were not allowed to apply so far that might happen next year but clearly this is an important part connecting the different communities later on. The criteria for the selection of these consortias are the readiness and relevance of the consortium and the research data management strategy and also the structure itself and viability. Yeah with all this background and we can actually even stop here if you have any questions already regarding NFDI and the formation of consortia I wanted to keep this rather short but still as this kind of special I wanted to give a very short background here seems to be not the case so I will continue with them NFDI from my quota and specific. I guess I don't have to tell this to people here in the call but still I need to make the point here microbial species and viral particles are affecting us basically everywhere they are influencing our health and I think the last month of the corona pandemic made it pretty clear that we need to take care of this we're still facing a lot of issues regarding antibiotic resistance and many other things basically a lot of diseases are caused by this also our gut microbiome and microbiome on other parts of our body are crucial for our survival and our health so that's pretty clear but what is often neglected is the strong impact actually on the whole ecosystem that basically the majority of the biomass out there are actually microbes and that all our food webs and our climate itself are influenced and are influencing microbiota and due to this we need a deep deep and broad understanding of these organisms since basically the beginning of humankind we are also using microbes for food production and in agriculture so they are key components in in this and this is why we need to understand this and meanwhile also lots of chemicals and vaccines on our generated on a biotechnological manner again understanding microbes here is a key is a key to a successful establishment of these kind of technologies so I would say it's it's indoubtable that microbes are of higher relevance for human beings and the society in general but I said I guess everybody knows this year still one thing to keep in mind is that scientific advances or the advance of science is always bound to technologies and if you look at this image here some might recognize this this is the one of the first microscopes developed and that was a game changer because suddenly we could see the small living beings there and this basically changed how we could perceive the world and could do science today we have again a change of tools and not not sure if everybody is recognizing this but this is basically a bunch of sequencing machines and VGI so today we have a lot of technologies high super technologies that we can basically with a push of a button generate terabytes of data and that is at first very good this means we we can perform science in a much more efficient way than than we did this before decades ago and we can basically generate a vast set of data easily well but the critical point is now translating this data into really insights terabyte of data doesn't help us because this is not not a solution to the problems that we're facing and this translation of data and insights is basically the scientific process and we think we we can do this better so there are common common challenges that researchers in microbiology are facing when they need to translate basically data into insights and in general on a very basic level is already the missing data management and I'm a bioinformatician by myself and I you know I had this rather often that people with a with a hard drive came to me or told me are can you please shortly download this from there and then a few years later they asked me oh do you have still the data because I've lost it and I've looked at where it is right now so maybe you have it somewhere I usually have it somewhere because I have a certain data management but still this is a fundamental skill that we need to give people and provide infrastructure to people to and there's often missing basically once you have your data somewhere in place and you want to start then people often recognize afterwards oh okay I did now let's say sequencing or a proteomics but I've no way of translating this into things that I can handle so a bioinformatic expertise is often required and missing once you have a terabyte of data lying around you might also recognize well this cannot be necessarily crunched on my little laptop here but I need a little bit more computational infrastructure I need a server and I need ways of storing things in there and I need to need to have software for do not this and that can be also a hampering part sometimes we do not have to generate new data but sometimes we just need to find data that is already generated for different purposes the problem is that there is a poor findability and this is kind of connected to the to the point below lack of metadata because if there are no metadata or metadata standards that needs to describe our data much better then it's very hard to go towards for find this and if we have a rich set and enforce this rich set of metadata connected to our data we can look for studies that did different things maybe from a different perspective but that can be integrated into our study that we want to run and by this principle making science much more efficient and much more cost effective and this is also then here limited access and reuse of data often high throughput analysis are done for example but the data is not necessarily available or again the metadata is not given there luckily we see at least the trend in there but still not everybody knows how to make data accessible in a proper fashion and another thing is that often with a lot of manual creation databases are generated for example in a PhD project and then as soon as the PhD leaves the lab this these kind of database are not maintained anymore and we see this kind of data rods and they see loss of very valuable data and information out there so these are a few common challenges that we see independent of the field in microbiology and that we would like to address and where we want to make science better and frictionless and seamless basically so that we have this kind of easy translation from insights into from data into insights. Konrad, is this the first one again? Sorry, you went back to the previous one. So I mean I read this slide and I have to apologize because I'm obviously new to this consortium and new to Germany again so I'm wondering about reading this slide because all of this is my friend friends at the EBI they would just say okay this is what we do. Yeah, and you're absolutely right and we'll see later we are exactly talking with the EBI regarding this so basically they highly appreciate it that we approach them in order then being did you talk to Guy Cochran or were you talking to him? No, we talked to Oeth Upweiler so basically and so basically we are on a very high level there and we basically offered that we bring this to the German community because you're absolutely right it's and we do not want to basically reinvent the wheel and start new repositories for example and the complete opposite actually we want to look what is out there or we know what is out there and want to guide the community to make better use of that. So I really appreciate your question here and absolutely agree that we basically solve things that are partially solved not everything but that are partially solved but the solution that we provide is basically bring this to the microbiological community that is often not doing this because these practices are kind of neglected and I can say this from my own experience here maybe I have different ones but it's pretty often pretty much the case that these kind of things are hampering. No I happen to agree I think there's a lot of there's a lot of airspace between where Guy Cochran who's the person at EBI doing this working for directly for Oeth Upweiler is and where usual the customers are usually and there is a translation layer missing and what what you're saying is you're positioning yourself as a translation layer between EBI services and that sounds great okay. Exactly, exactly. Thank you very much and again please feel free to interrupt me thank you Falka for being a good example how to do this here thank you. So our vision in general is that microbiologists and researchers from related fields can translate research data easily into a deep understanding of microbial species and their interaction on a molecular level so I read this and now a little bit more interpretation in principle we would like to take the friction out of the system. I mentioned this before often people generate data in one place then carry it on a hard drive to another place then stuff gets lost then they put it on one server we need to go somewhere else need to do analysis on this machine and then on that machine in the end they want to publish this and need to upload it somewhere else we want to take this friction out of the system make it much much easier for the scientific community basically to translate this data into insights and also independent of your your background so if you think let's say if you think in microbiome analysis so consortia of different species this is something that you can do as a medical doctor who is doing maybe some research and has some samples that he or she would like to analyze or you can do this as somebody who is trying to study oceans and the the procedure is pretty much the same but the question the questions that you're asking are rather different and sometimes there are even not your core questions but they are connected to what you're looking at so also these kind of related fields that I as I mentioned here would really profit from this kind of approach. Our mission as NFDI for microbiota is actually act as a central hub and support the community with access to data and also services data and metadata standards but also training basically helping people to help themselves with these kind of things. Coming to the consortia and we are kind of active since 2018 as mentioned we work hard in the beginning of NFDI for life umbrella and we still are connected to that but we extended since since that time so we have 10 so-called co-applicants and applicants so basically ZFB Med is the applicant but the others are so-called co-applicants this is the official speak here basically so the vocabulary so we are 10 of applicants co-applicants and as you can see we have a very broad background starting from infrastructure providers to universities to institutions dedicated to to this field and with this we have a well a broad spectrum of technologies available of capabilities of expertise and also a broad network inside the community so I would say we are definitely part of that microbial community. We also have participants and basically unfortunately you see this at the very bottom we had to close the list for the time being and that is mostly something to do with the evaluation process so August 15th was the deadline to handle in a letter of intent for the NFDI application and that was basically the the line to draw who's in and who's not who's in right now I would say because clearly the intention is to to use the infrastructure developed here and the solutions and to roll them out to a large fraction of the scientific community. Still in the beginning we needed to be limited to a certain set and that was basically the line to draw and we have now around 50 participating institutions and networks and this includes 3DFG priority programs, 3DFG collaborative research centers, one plus of excellence and we also have the next generation sequencing competence center which is also funded by the DFG as participants. The participants I've not written this in here but they are coming from all larger societies so basically communities we have people from universities, we have Max Plank in there, we have Leipzig in there, we have Helmholtz in here, we have Fraunhofer in there and basically a broad mixture in terms of topics we have bacteriologists, we have people working on archaea, we have people working on viral particles, we have people working on parasites, we have people working on algae so we have I guess everybody in the boat to have a I would say a little bit more than a very good test balloon and to establish these kind of approaches that we are thinking of. We also have supporting societies so basically the four I would say large societies VAM and DHTM for the bacterial and also archaeal people, we have the parasite people involved and we have also the viral society involved so with this we also think that we have a good standing inside of the community and importantly address what people want, it doesn't make sense to come up with our solutions that might be not needed by the different researchers but in the end we want to establish this channel to the communities in different fashions in order to fill gaps that people see. Putting this all on a map not the societies but basically all our co-applicants participating in institutions, networks and SPPs and SFPs we see we also all over Germany located and think we have a rather good standing here again and this coming a little bit into into Falker's question we also have international partners and networks we want to mention a few here due to Denbi we are part of LXC or contribute to LXC, clearly one big thing on the horizon or actually more than on the horizon but pretty close now is the European open science cloud EOSC, you've seen we have EMBL in the boat and EMBL or one outstation of EMBL is EMBL EBI and we are in close contact as Falker mentioned already they have a lot of solutions at hand and we basically want to be the interface to the German community and they really appreciate it that we would like to go in this direction. There are other initiatives like from GoFair, the fair microbiome and other networks implementation networks that we are interacting with and also for example the NCCR microbiomes from Switzerland's contact with us already and you see we you saw the the members or basically the co-applicants and you know we are very well connected inside the European international network and that is crucial. I mentioned this already before having let's say German standards doesn't make sense it also doesn't make sense to start new repositories for let's say sequencing data instead we are the local representatives to help people using this infrastructure that is out there and filling that gap in order to well make science on international level happening and science is always something that is global and cannot be national and that was by the way if I was not involved but at least this was a little bit reported the F so the national in NFDI was always a little bit debated because well research cannot happen only locally. Yeah then we have a small slide on that roughly displays the governance interactions that we that we are considering. We and let's let's maybe focus on the important part here so we are going to a step to the scientific board that is basically represented by the societies and also by international partners but also clearly we have a user council that is formed by participants in our user community clearly we need to interact with the NFDI directorate and that is one thing that was just recently established so basically this is infrastructure that we can build upon now and also in terms of contracts and all these kind of things we will not basically have a need a new association for this so this will be all under the umbrella of the NFDI directorate as centrally. Clearly we also will interact with other consortia I will dive into this in a second and clearly we try to integrate the data generators as mentioned we have the four sequencing centers involved but many of our participants have also sequencing centers or proteomics centers or other omics technologies at hand and there we can or this can be used as kind of a test balloon and or more to to establish this kind of workflows and the data handling and also the teaching and training there. Conrad is a question sorry sorry sorry I seem to be the only person asking question. I highly appreciate that please. I feel really awkward I owe you beer whenever we meet. No no. So how does how does one become a microbeauty service center? Yeah in principle those service centers are mainly meant to be given or hosted by by the applicants and co-op applicants but in principle there is no limitation that a participant can cannot do that and we as other consortia we will also ask for flex funds so flexible funds that can be allocated and given also to participants in order to actually give or provide a certain service and that that should help us also to fill gaps that we are not aware of and or not yet aware of that basically come up with a new technology is established or something like this and we are aiming now for five years and maybe even beyond that and clearly being agile and able to adapt to new needs is is crucial and there are also other members of the community so basically participants could become such a service center and could establish a service as such. So basically coming back to your question if you have a good idea that is missing or if you see something that we have not included so far please contact us and we we can see how this fits into our image there and that might be also something that is maybe not possible right now but that's something that is happening after a few years when we when we know that the base needs are covered and then new services for example need to be established. This is why we wrote here at the bottom and for micro-border members and not necessarily only the applicants and co-op applicants because in principle also participants that we see as member of that could contribute. Can I maybe interject? Yes please. Right so maybe this comes later I don't know maybe you could go into a bit more specifics of what we're talking about here in terms of kind of compute centers hardware and such because all of the discussions tend to happen on a somewhat higher level like how can we integrate how can we analyze I think the very first step needs to be like how do we manage the data and what's the actual physical hardware that does this? I can answer this already here we have a little bit like this later in the task areas but one core part or one core idea was and I mentioned this in the beginning was that the money should go into people basically and not to I have not mentioned there but not into hardware so there will be no funding for hardware as such and this is in the beginning sounds a little bit awkward but NFDI is basically meant to be a networking endeavor so it's mostly that the things that are out there should be better used and due to the networking of the different notes inside of the community the improvement should happen. Clearly this won't be enough and basically the NFDI is one part of it and EOSC is the other part so I guess there will be complementary funding happening or needed actually to do this. What you will see later on but I can do this here right now we have Denbi so the German bioinformatics infrastructure here and on board and that is for example the hardware that we'll use in the beginning and where already certain services are around. Maybe another question from my side. Yes please. The NFDI is called microbiota but it looks like that it's purely sequencing. To implement other technologies like proteomics, metabolomics, cultureomics whatever in this field to really to address the question of microbiota. No you're absolutely right and I'm not sure if I state this somewhere down there and we are not limited to sequencing and I mentioned this in the beginning already also other databases that might be of use are useful and we have actually it's a good point I'm not sure if I put this into the slides but it's also in our abstracts and we are not limited to sequencing we also have people with those proteomics background, metabolomics and we also have people with a biotechnology background to also put these kind of things into the game and only focusing on sequencing would be definitely not enough. I completely agree also we aim to interact with other consortia regarding imaging data for example so it's so much more than only sequencing. Sorry if I made this impression but it's definitely beyond that so thank you very much for the point here. Anything else that would like to kind of? Yeah let me ask another question since I'm in a habit of doing that. Yeah go for it. So I'm naive now okay I have a new aluminum machine it yields four terabases per run where does my hardware go where does my uh my fast queue files go? Who runs the analysis pipeline? Where does the data get stored? Those are questions that almost immediately come to my mind. Is this something that this project is about or is that okay? Yeah we aim to address that exactly but the crucial part is actually that before you sequence a single base that your metadata is properly annotated and stored. This is actually the one of the key things that we try to interact with the data generators and help them to enforce certain standards in terms of metadata that are then stored by us and also the data ideally is stored by us additionally so that they ideally. Sorry can I ask yeah let me get that so I mean you know my background right you know this is what I've done that doesn't seem to be a working proposal because you're basically following the model that that EBI is failing at and NCBI are failing at where you require metadata to be stored centrally prior to submission of sequences and this model has been proven not to work over and over again. Yeah because you don't have the mentor and the issue is usually the case the problems usually usually that the scientists themselves are not very keen on putting metadata into this and this is where data stewards and data librarians come into the game. So basically by educating this this kind of new jobs these new kind of roles that are sysed in the connection of metadata and consultancy of that and we try to overcome that issue and also one thing also that it's local and basically if you are kind of well forced to add this metadata then then you have well higher motivation to really enter these kind of things but again data quality and checking of this needs manpower and this is exactly what we want to put into the game. I'm not sure I follow I have to admit so it's the plan to have decentralized curators at basically every site because it seems to me like the reason we don't have data curators is because data curators don't scale. They don't scale but this is why you need to invest in them and it's still important so you train the scientists themselves the researchers themselves but you additionally give support by professional data curators data stewards that are helping to improve that situation. Interesting so let me comment on this from the perspective of the international metadata community because the GSC has basically analyzed the same problem or the same sphere and we've come to the conclusion and I'm their executive board that the solution here is not manpower but software. Which is one part of the whole thing clearly but you need also support it's both sides clearly and basically having an infrastructure that is assisting here and also holding all that information later on and also putting this into into a discovery service and so on that that's all part of it that we would like to establish but I think the software alone is not solving that but it's it's it's part of the solution. Maybe I could add something to that. So we are one of those data generators so we are one of four national sequencing centers and there are certain things that we can do that are otherwise a bit difficult to achieve so when a customer requests a sequencing project with us they would then be able to say this is something that should go into the NFDI infrastructure and we would then be able to automatically capture a whole range of metadata that is otherwise very annoying to produce like what sequencer, what library kits, what read length, all of that stuff. What we will not be able to do obviously is all the biological metadata. Where was this sampled? What organism is this? So there's obviously still a gap but at least some parts of the metadata should be then we're talking about software I guess. Yeah exactly yeah so ideally this falls all out of your limbs or even your electronic laptop notebook and you see later on that these kind of things are also addressed by us. It's also kind of changing the culture that was a point I made very early and the culture also means the whole scientific workflow. For example if journals are requesting as they do now more and more you have to put your data there but if they are also requesting the metadata then we have a good leverage to motivate people doing that and I know that it's extra effort. This is why having dedicated people working on this is crucial. I don't say it's easy, I really don't say it's easy but it's part of an approach that has different facets and we try to address all of those in here. It's definitely a challenge as it was before if you just give people the raw sequencing data and then tell them go upload it to EVI. I don't think that works and I guess that's also what this is kind of boiling down to and we're sort of trying to take that away this sort of initial barrier and saying your sequence with us will take care of the submission and then you just have to fill out this Excel sheet essentially and then we can track all of that as one submission and make it automatic in a sense. Exactly and not enter into it also several times right that you do this once and we're taking care of this metadata and pass it on and once the project is in the state of publication this kind of stuff can be directly given then to the central infrastructure in EVI or even NCBI if needed. By the way this is referred to as the metagenome registry, something we implemented with EVI a couple years back. It's a bunch of basically JSON that you need to work against. I'm still unclear as to the number of data curators we're talking about. Are these basically for the, you mentioned a limited number of data generators or are they basically limited to four or is there a larger number? Yeah no it's not a large number so far but this should be also compensated by training. It's basically central organized and not unfortunately not each sequence in the center will have somebody available like this. This is unfortunately not possible in this funding scheme if you boil it down what needs to be done there. But again hopefully this can be extended so we see this more as a starting point to showcase all that and then in terms of other funding getting more human power into the boat. But I really like the discussion so I'm very happy for further questions and that's also crucial right for us to get your feedback and as I said it won't be easy and it won't happen you know just by pushing a button it will be a long and dry path. I'm rather sure but I think it's worth walking this and if you have experience with this we're very happy to build upon those. Okay then I would say I would continue here. There is the so-called Leipzig Berlin Declaration for Crosscutting Topics that is part of let's say the NFDI community in general and we also signed that so we are also very happy to work together on these topics and share our opinions and also put even some energy into this and working on this together. More importantly we have bi-directional agreements with different consortia on very different topics where we would like to work together and have a heavy exchange in different fields that can be based on standards but that can be also technical infrastructure and several of our co-applicants are also members of different consortia so it makes also sense to use common infrastructure and basically leverage the synergies and clearly we are still open for further interactions with other and maybe upcoming NFDI consortia and if you think back microboter are a basic found area so it is crucial also on a scientific level to interact on these kind of things together. All right so the planned work program in a rough overview consists of these five task areas plus we have something which is called the use cases which they see connecting all these kind of things and I would like to go slowly with you through the different measures that we have. Let's face it the most interesting one is number four still the other ones are of relevance but number four are the well number one and number four are the ones that are closest to the people and are the actual things for the research community. So let's start clearly we need to do outreach in order to make people aware of this and by that avoid kind of double work and also get input by other people who have already experienced this. The connection to other NFDI consortia as mentioned is strongly ongoing and that's also very important to avoid reinventing the wheel several times and also the connection to international partners as mentioned before is crucial in order to have an international solution in terms of technologies but also standards and maybe also not actually maybe but also on the level of training. Clearly we need to do also some public relations that's very common but we also need to communicate into politics what we need and that is something that we actually saw a lot also in the recent month in terms of Covid because there were different funding or there was different funding happening interestingly very little on the omics level and on high throughput data but I think if we can establish a link to there we can also make them better understand how research is happening today and what kind of things are required. And last and definitely not least is training education in support. This is actually very crucial that this is maybe one thing that we can start very early because in the end we need to invest basically in minds as it was actually demanded and having a deep understanding of the problems that high throughput technologies bring and what kind of requirements are there and what is actually today good scientific practice is crucial. We have in the consortium several people who are very strong in the training aspect and we would like to use this network to bring this to many more people interested in basic data analysis but also good data management and everything in this direction. Standards and policies who mentioned this already before it's crucial to work on that. There are often already standards out there but it's also very important to look around how this can be brought to the people in the end and how to kind of enforce it. I would say force people to use it but to enforce the implementation of those in the different systems and by that removing a lot of friction and make movement of data and metadata easy and by that also improving this whole work process of scientists. We mentioned this again also before. Ideally you enter your metadata once or ideally the metadata is actually recorded by the machines then given downstream and building on these standards is basically crucial and sometimes unfortunately there are no standards and they first have to be developed and that would be also part. Similar thing is also even before the actual recording happens as a piece for experimental procedures and how they can be recorded would be also one thing that we would work on. Standards of workflows and tools there are things like CWL so common workflow language and so on that are things that we would like to support and extend and also implement in our structure. Also the development of policies for data management and publication sharing. I mentioned this that is kind of important to make clear that a publication should not look like how like it looks looked before let's say decades ago but that today publications must be much more transparent and we luckily have the means for doing this so there should be the data available there should be code available there should be also provenance of the data described. It should be pretty clear how we came from the original experiment to the measurement to the insights that were generated and that should be all part of publication and that should be shared and also here we see as a gap into the microbial community we come from let's say a very strong open access and open science background we all were fighting for fair data since many years already and basically here we want to be the translator for these kind of concepts and policies into the community. And legal policies and legal issues are here also important regarding licenses also here often a lot of training is also needed and people are not aware what kind of licenses they should use can use in order to make sharing of data possible and what kind of data they can actually reuse again. Okay then the technical infrastructure as said this is maybe something people are not so much interfacing with directly but still it's super important so the computational infrastructure operations itself as mentioned we are heavily building on Denby which is in my opinion is very successful and unique network that is the foundation not only for us but also for other NFDIs and that's a great foundation for the work here. We will also need to go further into data storage services including management and access control as basic data will not be directly publicly available off the sequencing but people would like to first do their studies and once they are done with their project would like to publish this clearly we need kind of access control to data. We will also need to develop new software and tools and also common components ideally shared with other NFDIs but clearly there will be also tools that are dedicated for the analysis of let's say microbial data or omics data in general but also here we might need to invest in certain solutions. We also service monitoring service monitoring and reporting will be also relevant to see what is happening on the hardware and also to distribute these kind of things and maybe also generating software repositories for sharing these kind of components and maybe real CI CD infrastructure so that these kind of things are automatically distributed to the productive machines after testing and so on. But now the I would say the core piece after number one so in the end we would like to have a central hub inclusive research and discovery services where people can start with analytical services can be hosted there and again as part of an international network mostly a European network. We also would like to host a databases and transfer databases that may be existing already but that are not maintained. We will run terminology services to translate also metadata into between metadata. Ideally we can do data quality and provenance services or can run those in order to take care of good quality and check these kind of things and most importantly also the provenance that we see the different steps data under underwent in order to to get to an insight. The final data deposition and as mentioned we will not run or very unlikely run new repositories. There are some of those established already and we would like to help getting the data into those with the data that we have already and also long-term preservation is something that we would aim for especially for metadata that doesn't have repositories so far we would work on. Also that was a wish kind of the from the community it's also this goes a bit into data quality and provenance and reviewing and recommending system for data that we know what is actually good data and maybe even purely getting credits for having a very good data set and that's also very motivating and is increasing the standards for data in general. Often people are not handling a single type of data but also would like to for example do genomics put transcutimics on top would like to correlate with this with proteomics and maybe put some metabolomics on top of this and also this should be addressed and it should end up in in modeling that with kind of a systems perspective on on bacteria and other microbial species. Another topic that we see exploding basically in all research fields at least in the life sciences I have to say electronic lab notebooks and also mentioned before I'm saying this a lot I'm making a lot of connections to previous things. Electronic lab notebooks are kind of a key component where these kind of things can be recorded and then give them further downstream and the important part is again that we have here open standards that help to share this and make it possible to pass it downstream. And we have also inside of the consortium already a lot of experience with these kind of tools and can recommend their tools and maybe also run own ones but that all needs to be discussed. So as mentioned this is the core part I would say the other part I sometimes says the the dry part clearly we need project governance we need project financial controlling we need reporting and most importantly we also need dynamic adaptation scalability. It's pretty clear that the ideas that we have right now and that we are writing down our own a proposal that this will facing reality at some point and needs to be adapted and changed and this is also why we have these or intend to have these flexible funds in there to well yeah be able to to to work with the world out there in a few years. Then finally we have use cases here a few examples we have more but we are always happy to extend this and we will work with the participants also to to to get more of those actually written down. For example antibiotic resistance screening sorry antibiotic screening, biorectoomics, benchmarking of frameworks, clinical viral genomics, clinical I think I don't read all of those down here. The main aim is actually to have a concrete cases where we connect our participants to and also connect it to the measures that we would like to implement so basically having a cross-cutting network of measures where we can connect measures and and activities and the participants and other players in the game and that is also one thing where we are very happy if people see use cases they would like to like to go through with us that they can be edited here. Okay with this we are already coming to the end and the hour the first hour is already close to be over and that would be also the part where you get into the play and again thank you so much for for your time already now and also for the comments of Volker I think I own you a beer I would say and the the way you can contribute now already is if you if you interested in joined data as mentioned unfortunately due to the evaluation process we we are closed at least for the time being but I'm rather sure that we will very soon add more people again and you can contact us if you'd like to join. You can suggest use cases especially for participants this is still the way to contribute and we will anyway get closer to this again you can give feedback in any way and we have once with several structured ways of doing this now and we have already around or we had already a round of a questionnaire that was sending around and we will start a new round now again for I don't have the data precisely at hand until just you know you can help me I think 11th of September we said thank you very much so we will share the link here again and we will also spread it over Twitter and our website again so few if you want to give feedback here via the question a detailed feedback that is possible. What we will do now is well we have structures this in different ways but maybe we can also have a discussion here right now again but we will have the following option for you right now we will have basically a small poll so whoever is very short on time we still would love to get your very minimal feedback just single start a poll in a few seconds once I'm done here where you can basically rank our or your feedback regarding our task areas from one poor to five strong. We also have a pet so basically a collaborative working document where you can basically simply write what was good what was bad and you can pick whatever you want you can write this to one of task areas to any you can add a use case and additionally we'd like to start a discussion with you I can make one in the big around but I would rather quickly move then to breakout rooms the breakout rooms are smaller rooms where a smaller group of people can discuss we we know that not everybody is comfortable speaking in in larger groups and why we had already some people speaking here intensively we're rather sure that other voices also should be heard and this is why we would like to offer these breakout rooms where an always one or two of NFDI for micro voter members are located and are very happy to to get your suggestions. All right with this I would like to thank you so much for your time I hope we could answer already a lot of questions that were in your head before but again the breakout rooms are also there for for asking for answering your questions but also give your your feedback. We also have to thank FDM NRW for the support this is always great because they can yeah organize a lot of things here and that was very helpful. Please join us on Twitter we have information on the website also the questioner whoever has to leave now with the question the questioner will be also linked on our website again and with this I would say I stop here and again thank you very much.
community of microbiology. The plan for today is this is driven by the scientific community. And into from data into insights. Konrad, is this the