To facilitate international collaboration and communication on research and education on global water microbiome studies, Global Water Microbiome Consortium was formed in May, 2014. Currently, we are launching Anaerobic Digester Microbiome Initiative.
GWMC consists of researchers around the world. Till now, around 70 research groups in different universities and organizations from 23 countries have taken part in GWMC. We are now welcome any individual investigators, researchers, laboratories, and institutions who have general interests in water microbiomes to participate in this consortium (e-mail: gwmc@ou.edu).
GWMC is initiating its second global sampling campaign for Anaerobic Digester Microbiome in 2018. The overall goal of ADMI is to provide system-level mechanistic understanding of the diversity, distribution, succession, and stability of global anaerobic digester microbiomes using high throughput metagenomic technologies.
We will greatly appreciate if you are interested in working with the GWMC on its anaerobic digester campaign. Specifically, we ask whether you can collect samples from one or several digesters for one or more timepoints according to the appended protocol. The microbial compositional data of your samples will be available to you free of charge. We also will appreciate it if you can help us to establish connections with other potential collaborators for this sampling project.
Contact: Dr. Jizhong Zhou (jzhou@ou.edu) Dr. Daliang Ning (ningdaliang@ou.edu)
Since 2014, GWMC launched its first initiative (Municipal Wastewater Microbiome Initiative) and focused on Activated Sludge Microbiome. From 2014 to 2015, GWMC collected around 1200 activated sludge samples from 269 WWTPs in 23 countries on 6 continents, involving over 110 investigators around the world.
Now, all samples have been analyzed by amplicon sequencing of 16S/ITS/18S rRNA and amoA genes, and representative samples will further be investigated with metagenomic analysis. Very interesting results are comming out. We will soon publish our findings.
In general, the samples for each initiative will be analyzed using various high throughput metagenomic technologies.
[1] Phylogenetic marker gene squencing: 16S/ITS/18S rRNA genes;
[2] Functional gene sequencing: e.g. amoA nosZ nifH etc.;
[3] Shotgun metagenomic sequencing;
[4] High throughput functional gene microarray: GeoChip.
The overall mission of this consortium is to provide a platform to facilitate international collaboration and communication on research and education on global water & wastewater microbiome studies.
Since May, 2014
Under this consortium, various efforts/projects can be initiated, such as municipal wastewater microbiome initiative (MWMI) and anaerobic digester microbiome initiative (ADMI).
IEG in University of Oklahoma is now carrying out all microbiome analysis for GWMC. Initially, we will seek funding from individual institutions, e.g. Tsinghua University (China), University of Oklahoma (USA).
Any individual investigators, researchers, laboratories, and institutions who have general interests in water microbiomes may participate in this consortium.
GWMC forms a steering committee (SC) to ensure that the research activities within GWMC remain the state-of-the-art. Also, an external scientific advisory committee will be established to provide advice on scientific directions and strategic plans for GWMC.
University of Oklahoma, USA
Tsinghua University, China
Newcastle University, UK
University of Tennessee, USA
Sun Yat-Sen University, China
Institute for Environmental Genomics
101 David L Boren Blvd
Norman, OK, 73019 USA