Chapter 1 Introduction

The Earth Hologenome Initiative (EHI, www.earthhologenome.org) is a global collaborative endeavour aimed at promoting, facilitating, coordinating, and standardising hologenomic research on wild organisms worldwide. The EHI encompasses projects with diverse study designs and goals around standardised and open access sample collection and preservation, data generation and data management criteria.

One of the main objectives of the EHI is to standardise optimal sampling, preservation, and laboratory methods based on open resources and knowledge. Currently, comparability and reproducibility of research data is one of the main issues of microbiome analyses, as molecular analysis of microbial communities is particularly sensitive to cross-contamination and variation in sample collection, preservation, and data generation (Aizpurua et al. 2023).

Here we detail cost-effective procedures that can be reproduced, automated and deployed in different laboratories, which are used to generate high-quality hologenomic data in the EHI.

  1. University of Copenhagen, ↩︎

  2. University of Copenhagen, ↩︎