Include the following sentence in the “Funding” or “Acknowledgement” section of publications:
Project description
Analyzing the impact of the human microbiome on health is a scientific and medical issue, and poses challenges both technologically (massive, dispersed, heterogeneous data) and ethically (identifying data and data with predictive value for health and lifestyle). The PEPR Food Systems, Microbiome and Health is funding an ambitious program aimed at stimulating microbiome analysis in France via targeted or open calls for projects, the results of which are intended to be Easy to find, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR principles).
The Cloud4SAMS targeted project aims to deploy a distributed digital infrastructure allowing researchers to exploit microbiome and health data in a secure computing environment. It relies on the federation of computing resources operated by different institutions and distributed across different sites: datasets produced by microbiome projects (including those that will be funded by the PEPR SAMS), software tools and workflows for processing these data, computing platforms and storage appropriate for processing microbiome data and matching them with health data. These resources will be indexed in the Cloud4SAMS catalog (WP2), and will serve as building blocks to define deployment recipes describing all the procedures for instantiating a virtual machine in a secure cloud (WP3), for installing the entire software environment and for hosting the datasets required for the project. Access to this data (WP4) is facilitated by an interface which manages requests to the access committees of each project, the validation of authorizations, the ad hoc extraction of data and their transfer to secure spaces.
The project includes a significant component dedicated to dissemination and training (WP5): support for data producers for data quality assessment, metadata improvement, and submission to reference repositories; training of users on IT resources (catalog, access portal, secure environments) but also on ethical and legal issues relating to personal data. These crucial issues will be the subject of WP6, which will consist of conducting risk and impact studies in order to define the legal framework for data sharing and the appropriate level of cybersecurity for the processing of human microbiome data, and for their matching with health data.
The architecture and implementation will be based on the expertise and standards developed by the IFB (catalogue of bioinformatics resources, FAIRisation and data brokering tools) and by the ELIXIR network (bio.tools catalogue, workflow hub, EDAM ontology, Federated European Genome Archive).
Taking into account financial resources and deadlines, this project will be limited to implementing a proof of concept (POC) aimed at deploying all the basic building blocks and testing the system in a few selected case studies (WP7) based on data produced by the partner teams or available in public access.
