MICROFLORA DANICA – The Microbiome of Denmark

Between 1761 and 1883 a comprehensive atlas of botany named Flora Danica was published. The atlas contains all wild plants native to Denmark. We feel the time is right to expand this atlas by addition of the Microflora Danica – a reference database of the microbes of Denmark. By sampling soil, sediment, and water across both natural and cultural habitats and by applying novel DNA-based sequencing technologies, we wish to generate an almost complete reference database of the microbiome of Denmark. Furthermore, 500 samples from the Earth Microbiome Project, has been included with the purpose of evaluation of the contribution towards illuminating the global microbial dark matter.
The purpose of the Flora Danica was to share the knowledge of botany and by doing so to obtain greater knowledge of both the useful and harmful properties of the various native plants. Similarly, the purpose of Microflora Danica is to establish a common reference database and to link the identified microbes to their functions and distributions across different habitats. Roughly 7.000 samples have been collected and 3.100 have had DNA extracted. Around 2.000 samples have been prepared for sequencing using a custom 10x shotgun miniaturization protocol and 600 has been sequenced on the NovaSeq 6000 platform. Furthermore, 130 samples have been chosen to serve as the backbone of a Denmark-specific reference database built on high-accuracy full-length 16S sequences generated on the Nanopore MinIon platform.