🌍 Microorganisms from multiple taxonomic domains engage in intermicrobial interactions to form communities in all biomes. 🦠 Even with identical community members, these complex interactions can vary in time, space and due to changes in abiotic factors. 🧰 The range of in silico, in vitro or in vivo methods used to study these interactions is equally wide, and all of them produce a large amount of data.
➡️ However, there is no standard to report intermicrobial interactions and a dire need for an open access platform to datasets that support this evidence!
This organization is a way to gather initiatives that pave the way towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) Representations of Microbial Interactions (MI).
Together as a community, we can develop Minimum Information about Intermicrobial Interaction Data (MIIID; pronounced /miːd/ like 'mead').
📫 If you have questions, feel free to contact Alan (apacheco [AT] biol.ethz.ch) or Charlie (cpauvert [AT] ukaachen.de). If you have technical questions regarding the MIIID schema or want to join the Github organisation, please contact Charlie (cpauvert [AT] ukaachen.de).
We explained the need for FAIR-MI and MIIID in our Perspective paper:
Pacheco, A. R., Pauvert, C., Kishore, D., & Segrè, D. (2022). Toward FAIR Representations of Microbial Interactions. MSystems, 7(5). https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00659-22.
We showcased a way to describe and validate interaction data in our poster:
Pauvert, C., & Pacheco, A. R. (2023). Microbial interactions descriptions for humans and machines alike. Congress of European Microbiologists (FEMS), Hamburg, Germany. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8214358