Group Discussion Questions

Session 1

One goal of this workshop is to build a community of ARS researchers doing microbiome work. We have a series of discussions sessions that are designed to give you time to discuss your work and things that could be done and foster a community of practice.

Session on is focused on what you are going and what you need from a community. We have provided guiding questions but feel free to discuss other needs or areas.

• What kinds of microbiome work have you done and what challenges did you face?
• If you have not done microbiome work what are you thinking of doing and are there obstacles to starting?
• Are there specific resources that could have helped you?
• Do you need access to sequencing or sequencing expertise?
• Do you need access to computational resources compute time, storage, high memory machines?
• Do you need better access to people with scripting or programming experience?
• Do you need access for training in computational areas for you or your employees?
• Do you have the opportunity to work with other scientists on microbiome projects currently?
• If you could have a partner for microbiome research they would…

Session 2

• What is the best approach to develop an ARS microbiome community?
• How to develop and share best practices for:
  1. Experimental Design
  2. Data sampling
  3. Processing samples
  4. Data analysis
  5. To encourage efficient algorithms do we use compute resources wisely.
  6. Data preservation
• What would you like to get out of a community focused on microbiome research?

• What do your think you would contribute?

• Considerations for data analysis. How to maximize ARS computational power

• If I were giving advice to a person entering the field my advice would be?

• I have developed [xxxxxxx] and am willing to share with the community with user friendly documentation.