For the second year running, the France 2030 research programme ‘Food Systems, Microbiomes and Health’ (PEPR SAMS) organised its annual scientific conference, which was attended by the Cloud4SAMS project team. This year’s event took place on 31 March and 1 April in the auditorium of the Imagine Institute (Paris), bringing together stakeholders from the programme to discuss new projects supported by the research programme and progress on projects already underway.
On this occasion, a presentation by the Cloud4SAMS project was scheduled (on the morning of Tuesday 31 March), during which C. Médigue outlined the project, highlighting its objectives and the main progress made over the past 18 months. C. Blanchet then detailed the developments carried out around Biosphère (the IFB’s academic cloud, for which he is responsible), which has been enhanced with applications dedicated to metagenomic data analysis covering the use cases of Cloud4SAMS: Four new appliances provide internationally recognised tools for metagenomic data processing (MetaPhlan, Meteor, mOTUs, MAGNETO), whilst one appliance (MIASSM) provides a database structuring public microbiome datasets.
These PEPR SAMS scientific days were also intended to discuss various topics of interest to the wider research community: the contribution of AI to the field, data management, support for public policy, and participatory research. In this context, on the morning of 1 April, Claudine Médigue (CNRS, Cloud4SAMS co-PI) chaired a round table discussion on the analysis and management of microbiome data with Hugues Berry, head of Inserm’s AI & Digital Division, and three members of the Cloud4SAMS project: Nicolas Pons (INRAe, Cloud4SAMS co-PI), Christophe Blanchet (CNRS, WP3 co-coordinator, digital infrastructure), and Guillaume Gautreau (INRAe, WP6 co-coordinator, regulatory aspects). The discussions addressed the regulatory issues raised by the potentially identifiable nature of microbiome data.
These two days provided an opportunity to showcase the progress made by the Cloud4SAMS project and to encourage dialogue between the various stakeholders in the field!