Workshop Objectives and Background

1. Explore cross-cutting themes and key challenges in microbiome science.

2. Facilitate advances in the development of rigorous hypothesis-testing and strong ecological foundations within microbiome research.

3. Stimulate the search for generalizable concepts, principles and language for microbiome assembly and functions.

4. Identify key cross-community knowledge and resource gaps and opportunities for advancing the field.

In total, this conference will identify critical gaps in resources and understanding of microbiomes across disciplines and promote community-wide, collaborative efforts to address key resource and knowledge gaps.

Over the past decade, microbiome research has advanced dramatically across plant, human, environmental, and animal systems. Significant technical innovations have propelled exponential increases in the volume of microbiome data generated, and scientists are seeking to actively manage microbiomes to enhance human, animal, plant, and ecosystem health. Yet development of conceptual, theoretical, and analytical infrastructure to advance our collective understanding of microbiomes lags behind. Microbiome research suffers from a lack of reliance on explicit conceptual frameworks for ecological and evolutionary hypothesis testing, and there have been few attempts to develop generalizable models for microbiome community dynamics or assembly. Moreover, fragmentation of research efforts across systems (animal, human, plant, environmental), and even among researchers using different approaches to study the same system, has restricted opportunities to identify common principles of microbiome structure or organization.