As Sarai Finks was sorting through datasets of bacterial genome sequences last year, she became frustrated by missing information. Finks studies how dietary changes affect the communities of bacteria-infecting viruses that live in our guts, and how these changes in turn affect our health. She needed to know more about the microbiome samples represented in the datasets – in particular, more details about the human environments they came from. Where did the person live? What kind of foods did they eat? What did they drink? The lack of specifics made it difficult for Finks to connect all the dots about the organisms and how they interact with other microbes as the gut conditions shift due to diet.
On one hand, the mere existence of a wealth of biological data that Finks did not have to generate herself was a boon. On the other hand, the data was a mess – inconsistent and incomplete.
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