It is the task for the working group “Biodiversity informatics” to characterize these communities and interactions. Hereby, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) massively generates molecular data of microbial communities with relative ease and low cost. The department receives and analyzes data from both 16S gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomics studies. By applying conventional statistics and machine learning methods, it is our goal to shed new insight into the microbial diversity and their functions.

The National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfra-struktur; NFDI) is an association which has been consigned to systematically and sustainably improve management, long-term storage, accessibility, and usability of research data. Partners from German universities and research institutions collaborate in 26 different thematic NFDI consortia, covering all scientific disciplines, and are funded by the German federal and state governments to work towards these goals. The Leibniz Institute DSMZ is member of the NFDI association, as well as partner in two NFDI consortia, NFDI4Biodiversity and NFDI4Microbiota.

The German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (DSMZ) is home to a diverse portfolio of biological databases, covering a wide range of domains such as microbial strains (BacDive), cultivation media (MediaDive), microbial taxonomy (LPSN), enzymology (BRENDA), bacteriophages (PhageDive), cell line data (CellDive), rRNA data and taxonomy (SILVA), and StrainInfo, a service that integrates strain identity information from multiple sources. Together, they represent a treasure trove of biological knowledge, serving as essential resources for the life sciences, which has also been acknowledged by the Global Biodata Coalition and ELIXIR by selecting four of the resources as Global Core Biodata Resources and three of them as ELIXIR Core Data Resources, respectively.