About

Who Are We
We are an international group of scientists from 23 countries interested in soil metagenomics.

A Little History
We had a meeting in Lyon, France in December 2008. The goal of the Lyon 2008 meeting was to establish a working public international consortium for the complete sequencing of the metagenome of a reference soil. The soil system chosen for initial investigation, Park Grass, Rothamsted (UK), is a charismatic, internationally-recognized resource that includes ongoing experiments that have been running for over 140 years. This unique long term ecological site (LTER) provides a history of soil biology and chemistry, as well as an archive of soil samples representing detailed studies of the impact of manipulations and its metagenome sequence will constitute the “reference” sequence to which other soils could be compared.

The French National Research Agency (ANR) has funded a project (Metasoil) that will establish the initial basis for the consortium work, including sampling, DNA extraction, fosmid library construction (2×106 clones) and preliminary sequencing.

Information concerning the French project was presented and invited speakers presented the state of the art in soil metagenomics including new techniques and concepts that make the objective of complete sequencing achievable and timely. The meeting provided the opportunity for scientists and funding agency representatives to discuss the further potential funding for this research and the guidelines for participating in the consortium.

The provisional composition of the International public consortium, objectives and preliminary timetables was established during the Lyon 2008 meeting.