> On 20 May 2019, at 22:59, Chris Mungall <cjmungall@lbl.gov> wrote:
>
> I think there's something I'm not getting across here - my objection isn't that biosample isn't applicable to plant samples (although it does seem very human-centric, e.g. gender; how would we deal with hermaphroditic plants, or a female flower from a hermaphrodicitic plant)
>
> the objection is that it's misaligned to the microbiome use case where we have a sample that consists of multiple microbes and environmental material in some environmental context (which may itself involves other organisms, e.g. plant roots).
Just adding that I'm in the same boat w/ Chris here. Also I think that w/ a widespread use of "biosample" as representing (parts of) an organism, and environmental samples not necessarily only "bio", I'd rather scope biosample to the more familiar context (instead e.g. using "tissueSample" or such, which opens its own can of worms...).
Michael.
Prof. Dr. Michael Baudis
Department of Molecular Life Sciences
University of Zurich
SIB | Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
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