Minimum information about a biofilm experiment (MIABiE): standards for reporting experiments and data on sessile microbial communities living at interfaces

Abstract

The minimum information about a biofilm experiment (MIABiE) initiative has arisen from the need to find an adequate and scientifically sound way to control the quality of the documentation accompanying the public deposition of biofilm-related data, particularly those obtained using high-throughput devices and techniques. Thereby, the MIABiE consortium has initiated the identification and organization of a set of modules containing the minimum information that needs to be reported to guarantee the interpretability and independent verification of experimental results and their integration with knowledge coming from other fields. MIABiE does not intend to propose specific standards on how biofilms experiments should be performed, because it is acknowledged that specific research questions require specific conditions which may deviate from any standardization. Instead, MIABiE presents guidelines about the data to be recorded and published in order for the procedure and results to be easily and unequivocally interpreted and reproduced. Overall, MIABiE opens up the discussion about a number of particular areas of interest and attempts to achieve a broad consensus about which biofilm data and metadata should be reported in scientific journals in a systematic, rigorous and understandable manner.

Enabling systematic, harmonised and large-scale biofilms data computation: The Biofilms Experiment Workbench

“…The international consortium MIABiE has initiated the identification and organisation of a set of modules containing the minimum information that needs to be reported to guarantee the interpretability and independent verification of experimental results, and their integration with knowledge coming from other fields [10]. To prevent ad hoc analysis and to equip researchers with suitable computational means is an immediate necessity of this community effort.…”

“…The BML does not aim to overtake or compete with any existing standard or representation but rather to address biofilm-specific information requirements. Notably, the MIABiE consortium decided to delegate the documentation guidelines of non biofilmspecific data to the appropriate community initiatives [10]. For instance, data coming from transcriptome, proteome and other "omic" technologies applied to biofilm populations should be documented as suggested by MIAME [14], MIAPE [15], and similar guidelines.…”

“…The MIABiE initiative, 2 encompassing an international body of Biofilms experts, is working on the definition of guidelines to document biofilms experiments and the standardisation of the nomenclature in use [10]. Biofilmscentred databases such as BiofOmics 3 [11] and MorphoCol 4 [12] are already endorsing these guidelines and making experimental data publicly available.…”

BaAMPs: the database of biofilm-active antimicrobial peptides

“…Recently, attempts have been made to establish the minimum information that needs to be reported to guarantee the interpretability and independent verification of experimental results involving biofilms (Lourenço et al 2014). Nevertheless, a consensus on standardized operating protocols for assessing AMP anti-biofilm activity is still missing and different methods and experimental procedures are used in the literature for this purpose.…”

Designing an Ontology Tool for the Unification of Biofilms Data

“…Currently, the Minimum Information About a Biofilm Experiment (MIABiE) international consortium (http://miabie.org) is working on the definition of guidelines to document biofilm experiments and the standardisation of the nomenclature in use. Specifically, this consortium has established the minimum set of information be recorded and published about an experiment in order for the procedure and results to be unambiguously and comprehensive interpreted [4]. These issues were discussed with field experts -at the Eurobiofilms 2013 meeting in Ghent, Belgium (9-12 September 2013) -as means to accommodate for as much of this complexity and variability as possible, and anticipate new requirements resulting from the increasing use of highthroughput methods.…”