Meeting Report: Metagenomics, Metadata and MetaAnalysis (M3) at ISMB 2010

This report summarizes the proceedings of the first day of the “Metagenomics, Metadata and MetaAnalysis” (M3) workshop held at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology 2009 conference. The second day dedicated to the inaugural meeting of the BioSharing initiative is presented in a separate report. The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) hosted the first day of this Special Interest Group (SIG) at ISMB to continue exploring the bottlenecks and emerging solutions for obtaining biological insights through large-scale comparative analysis of metagenomic datasets. The M3 SIG included invited and selected talks and a panel discussion, one at the end of the day involving the plenary speakers. Further information about the GSC and its range of activities can be found at http://gensc.org/. Information about the newly established BioSharing effort can be found at http://biosharing.org