The soil is teeming with microorganisms. Researching them is not easy because many of them cannot yet be cultivated in the laboratory. Therefore, researchers often record so-called metagenomes - the entirety of the genes of the microorganisms in a sample. More than 200,000 such metagenomes are available in public databases. But there is a problem: the data sets in them are not subject to a uniform standard, making it difficult to put the data to use. A team from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) has now processed 15,000 of these data records according to uniform standards and merged them into a new database. This was published in the scientific journal "Nucleic Acids Research".

Standardized metadata

The data are taken from the databases "MG Rast" and "Sequence Read Archive". However, the datasets are often incomplete and not uniformly marked. For example, information on the temperature of the soil sample can be stored in Kelvin, Fahrenheit or Celsius. "This makes it more difficult for interested users to further process the data," says Ulisses Nunes da Rocha, microbial ecologist at the UFZ. For the new "TerrestrialMetagenomeDB" database, the researchers have therefore standardized all metadata such as temperature, pH value and geographical coordinates according to an existing standardization methodology.