A history of the MetaSUB consortium: Tracking urban microbes around the globe
Krista Ryon, Braden Tierney, Alina Frolova, André Kahles, Christelle Desnues, Christos Ouzounis, Cynthia Gibas, Daniela Bezdan, Youping Deng, Ding He, Emmanuel Dias‐Neto, Eran Elhaik, Evan E. Afshin, George S. Grills, Gregorio Iraola, Haruo Suzuki, Johannes Werner, Klas I. Udekwu, Lynn M. Schriml, Malay Bhattacharyya, Manuela Oliveira, María Mercedes Zambrano, Nur Hazlin Hazrin-Chong, Olayinka Osuolale, Paweł P. Łabaj, Prisca Tiasse, Sampath Rapuri, Sílvia Borràs, Sofya Pozdniakova, Tieliu Shi, Osman Uğur Sezerman, Xavier Rodó, Zehra Hazal Sezer, Christopher E. Mason
Abstract
The MetaSUB Consortium, founded in 2015, is a global consortium with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, scientists, bioinformaticians, engineers, and designers, with members from more than 100 countries across the globe. This network has continually collected samples from urban and rural sites including subways and transit systems, sewage systems, hospitals, and other environmental sampling. These collections have been ongoing since 2015 and have continued when possible, even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The consortium has optimized their workflow for the collection, isolation, and sequencing of DNA and RNA collected from these various sites and processing them for metagenomics analysis, including the identification of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. Here, the Consortium describes its foundations, and its ongoing work to expand on this network and to focus its scope on the mapping, annotation, and prediction of emerging pathogens, mapping microbial evolution and antibiotic resistance, and the discovery of novel organisms and biosynthetic gene clusters.