The bioinformatics landscape in environmental omics: Lessons from a national ELIXIR survey.

As a research infrastructure with a mission to provide services for bioinformatics, ELIXIR aims to identify and inform its target audiences. Here, we present a survey on a community of researchers studying the environment with omics approaches in Greece, one of the youngest member-countries of ELIXIR. Personal interviews followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis were employed to document interactions and practices of the community and to perform a gap analysis for the transition towards multiomics and systems biology. Environmental omics in Greece mostly concerns production of data, in large majority on microbes and non-model organisms. Our survey highlighted: i) the popularity and suitability of targeted hands-on training events; ii) data quality and management issues as important elements for the transition to multiomics, iii) lack of knowledge and misconceptions regarding interoperability, metadata standards and pre-registration. The publicly available collected answers represent a valuable resource in view of future strategic planning.