Discussion Notes on Definitions
Summaries from slack discussions
- The question originally was whether there was a depth/percent coverage cut-off for inclusion
- Discussion concluded this was a subjective measure and we do not currently have a field-wide 'standard'
- Outcome:
- 'Fallback' to the practical definition of: if a paper reports it as genome we can include it.
- Concept being: be as inclusive as possible
- But, this list does not make statements on quality and researchers still need to do their own QC
- While we support data re-analysis (e.g. metagenomic analysis of samples originally used for WGS studies), this is currently problematic how to list papers like this:
- how to correctly attribute the data? Should both or just original data depositor be cited (however then link with metagenome is hidden)
- how to prevent inclusion of all ancient samples (given they are intrinsically metagenomic) ever published, given the thousands of samples studied in ancient pop-gen
- Outcome:
- Only include metagenomic studies generated and deposited own data
- Or samples that implicitly 'metagenomic' (e.g. microbiomes from shotgun sequenced dental calculus), even if original purpose was for other research (e.g. retrieving human DNA for pop-gen analysis)
