As a fast developing research area, environmental DNA (eDNA) stands to gain from shared resources, such as sampling procedures, research plans, identified sequences, and taxonomic designations of sequences. Comprehensive metadata documentation that captures the intricate workflows involving field sampling, molecular biology lab work, and bioinformatic studies is a critical component of high-quality community shareable eDNA resources. There aren’t any open-source software and there are few sources that provide documentation about database development on thorough metadata for eDNA.
The authors have introduced medna-metadata, an open-source, modular system that adheres to the guiding principles of being Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable in order to support scholarly data reuse and the database and application development of a standardised metadata collection structure that encompasses important elements of field data collection, wet lab processing, and bioinformatic analysis. Data from the Gulf of Maine’s metabarcoding are displayed via Medna-metadata (Polinski et al., 2019).
The source code of the medna-metadata is available on GitHub (https://github.com/Maine-eDNA/medna-metadata)
Reference:
Kimble M. et. al. (2022) medna-metadata: an open-source data management system for tracking environmental DNA samples and metadata.Bioinformatics 38(19): 4589–45.