Launched in summer 2021, EMBRC’s European Marine Omics Biodiversity Observation Network (EMO BON), aims to enhance the European contribution to global genomic observation efforts. EMO BON will fill current gaps in biological observation, while offering insights into the genetic composition of marine biodiversity.
Its primary aim is to ensure steady, continuous generation of ‘baseline’ data on biodiversity at EMBRC sites following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles. EMO BON will ultimately provide Europe with a means to monitor and understand its marine biodiversity. This in turn will facilitate the development of new products and services for society.
Participating stations and sampling
EMO BON collects samples from the water column, soft substrates, and hard substrates, aiming to allow researchers to explore marine diversity in different habitats. It will be based around a network of currently 16 sites from Northern Norway to the tropical Red Sea in Israel. Standard operating procedures have been developed with the participating EMBRC partners and can be found in the EMO BON Handbook.
Samples are collected at the participating observatories every two months (water and soft substrates) to a year (hard substrates) and processed according to the SOPs. Four replicas are collected, two for immediate use, and two are biobanked for future exploration. Samples are collected centrally in Paris every four-to-six months and shipped for DNA extraction and sequencing at a centralised facility.
EMO BON data
EMO BON data are managed and published via the EMO BON GitHub space, which sits behind this webpage. The sampling logsheets from each station are harvested into GH, undergo a quality control, and then are combined, semantically annotated, and published in CSV and RDF formats. Each repository is described and wrapped up as a Ro-Crate. All logsheet data are open access.
As the sequences are produced by the sequencing facility, they will be archived in ENA under project PRJEB51688, after an embargo period of 6 months. The ENA accession numbers will be made available on the EMO BON GH also.
EMO BON bioinformatics
Currently, all metagenomics from EMO BON are to be processed through the MetaGOflow pipeline. The outputs from this processing are also stored in our EMO-BON GH.
Navigating this EMO BON data landing page
As you scroll down this webpage you will see Our Data Packages. This lists the selected repositories which are of the most interest to users, including
- o The repositories holding the logsheet (meta)data for the observatories, listed by observatory name.
- o Governance metadata, use to control the data management workflows and actions in this GH space.
- o Sequencing data, containing all the ENA-related metadata.
You can browse these either as a GitHub reposotory (click on the GH icon) or via our Ro-Crate viewer (click on the filing box icon). For the full set of repositories, you can also navigate directly to the GitHub space.
Using EMO BON data
To cite EMO BON, use the following publication:
Santi I, Beluche O, Beraud M, Buttigieg PL, Casotti R, Cox CJ, Cunliffe M, Davies N, de Cerio OD, Exter K, Kervella AE, Kotoulas G, Lagaisse R, Laroquette A, Louro B, Not F, Obst M, Pavloudi C, Poulain J, Præbel K, Vanaverbeke J and Pade N (2023) European marine omics biodiversity observation network: a strategic outline for the implementation of omics approaches in ocean observation. Front. Mar. Sci. 10:1118120. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2023.1118120a
If you use EMO BON data in your study, please cite the relevant EMO BON data paper and please add the following acknowledgement in your publication:
This work used resources provided by the European Marine Omics Biodiversity Observation Network (EMO BON) innitiative, coordinated by the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC)