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Decontaminating low biomass microbiome data is crucial, especially in the drinking water microbiome field. I think creativity and transparency in our approaches will be critical to approaching this ongoing challenge. Below, I summarize my experiences analyzing contaminated amplicon data. In a future post, I’ll focus on metagenomics.
Published:
After talking to fellow researchers at IWA-MEWE and beyond, I have created a Slack for our research community that I hope will facilitate more communication outside of conferences. I was inspired by several other great Slacks (Anvi’o and Microbial ‘omics), and since these already exist, the drinking water microbiome Slack will not be a bioinformatics help forum. Instead, I’d love to see it used as a place where we can offer feedback on preliminary experimental designs, work toward the standardization and scientific rigor needed for our methods to be useful to the water industry, and informally discuss challenges in our field.