Collaborative Research: ABI Innovation: Biofilm Resource and Information Database (BRaID): A Tool to Fuse Diverse Biofilm Data Types

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The "Biofilm Resource and Information Database (BRaID)" project is a collaboration between the Center for Biofilm Engineering (CBE) at Montana State University, Bozeman, MT and the Gianforte School of Computing at MSU and the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), Santa Fe, NM. Biofilms are microbial communities that have important impacts on water quality, food production, energy-making processes, and various aspects of human and animal health. BRaID serves as a community resource, containing both data and the metadata (where or how data was collected, processed, and interpreted). Some examples of metadata include: a geographical location, such as the Bozeman Water Reclamation Facility; microenvironments such as water chemistry; environmental factors such as changes in temperature, perturbations such as adding corrosion inhibitors; and interventions such as antibiotic treatments. BRaID has utility to a broad range of stakeholders in basic and applied research, as such it is expected to enhance the competitiveness of US industry, basic research, and defense, as well as assist with advancements in human health, environmental health, and energy production. Outreach activities will include (1) dissemination of research outcomes to local community members and industry stakeholders at conferences and legislator engagements; (2) involvement of underrepresented Native American students from high schools and tribal colleges in summer research activities as well as undergraduate researchers at MSU-Bozeman; and (3) educational activities in undergraduate and graduate courses at MSU, as well as summer internship, outreach and training activities at the NCGR.Awareness of the importance of microbial biofilms - microorganisms growing as aggregates attached to surfaces, interfaces, or each other - has exploded in the past decade. Diverse microbial communities grow as biofilms in such settings as dental plaque, heart valves, natural watercourses, wastewater treatment processes, cooling systems, oil and gas pipelines, and persistent infections. Biofilms can have significant impacts on human health, industrial productivity, and natural resources, spanning natural, engineered, and medical systems. Despite the importance of biofilms, there is no public web portal and database dedicated to storage, analysis, and communication of biofilm-specific data. Part of the reason for this is the sheer breadth of data types used to describe biofilms, including nucleotide sequences, images, video, chemistry (water, surface, and extracellular polymer matrix), remediation history, clinical outcomes, and geospatial data. BRaID will complement existing microbial databases by developing a data representation paradigm that solves the problems posed by the challenge arising from the unique combination of data, and will implement new metrics and algorithms for the formal description and analysis of biofilms data. This project aims to provide the premier resource that offers users the ability to ask complex questions (including those currently impossible to answer), permitting quantitative comparisons among biofilms, supporting remediation efforts, and enabling predictions about outcomes. Results of the project can be found at: http://ncgr.org/braid.