We are happy to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has renewed the grant supporting microBEnet for one final time, through 2019. As the “Microbiology of the Built Environment” program comes to an end at the Sloan Foundation, we will use this time to focus on sustainability, both of the microBEnet website and the MoBE community itself which appears solidly on the path to grow and continue beyond the end of the Sloan program.
Our efforts in the next two years will focus on three areas, a summary from the grant is below:
- microBEnet as a hub. Continuing and refining the role of microBEnet as a hub for the MoBE field (improving efficiency and connecting to other networks).
- Education, training and outreach. Developing and carrying out key MoBE focused education, training and outreach activities (e.g., courses, citizen science, Wikipedia editing).
- Reference data. Building partnerships focused around key reference data sets (e.g., reference genomes from the Eisen lab, curated rRNA gene sequence data sets from the Knight Lab, metagenomes and other “omic” sets).
We will be soliciting community input on all three of these areas as we start to ramp up each activity starting this Summer/Fall. More details to come!