Analyses and property rights

Upon reception, samples will be treated following relevant safety measures and subjected to DNA extraction and analysis of fungal and bacterial DNA following best practices (www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0386-6). As a major innovation of this project, the physical material (leaves) and data belong to participants, and these are made available free of charge over the plutoF work bench / biodiversity portal (plutoF.ut.ee) for each user.

To comply with global biodiversity treaties, the physical samples are destroyed (or sent back upon request) after analyses. The project leaders confirm that this project serves only the fundamental biodiversity research goals, with no financial benefits or potential to use these materials commercially.

The molecular and statistical analyses of this project will provide answers to our questions regarding the distribution of leaf-associated microbial biodiversity. The results are communicated step-by-step to participants. The final analyses are published in high-ranking scientific journals, with all data sets made publicly available.