Improving accessibility to ancient microbiome data beyond palaeogenomics

Ancient metagenomics is a powerful tool for adding a deep-time dimension to biological projects. Being able to look into the past gives us the ability to trace the long-term evolutionary relationships between microbiomes and their hosts. Therefore, ancient microbiomes represent a rich untapped source of potentially extinct biodiversity. However, to date, the use of ancient metagenomic data has been largely limited to the fields of archaeology, palaeoecology, and biological anthropology. In this poster I present two community iniatives from the SPAAM community to improve the metadata reporting and findability of ancient host-associated microbiome data (database: AncientMetagenomeDir, aDNA MIxS checklist: MInAS). I will given an overview on the open-source bioinformatic best-practice pipeline (nf-core/eager), and demonstrate how it improves the accessibility of reproducible ancient DNA analysis for both host and microbial data. Finally, I will present a case-study on how we are utilising these resources to explore past biodiversity in order to tackle present-day problems, including the identification of new antibiotics