Dear ribosomal RNA community,

to secure financing and to improve the SILVA system for the next years a survey was initiated on the SILVA page.

The intention was to make sure that we navigate SILVA in the right direction. 

Feedback (relevant, neutral, irrelevant) was requested for 10 suggested developments.

Additional comments and suggestions could be added to the free text field.

The survey was opened on 25.03.2010 and was been closed on 09.04.2010 (16 days).

In summary we received 145 responses from 26 different countries.

Many thanks for your help.

1. I have found SILVA a fantastic service for myself and the students that I work with. It has made ARB accessible to a wide variety of researchers and has accelerated our phylogenetic analyses. Thanks guys!
2. The SILVA database project is the only group that is providing a frequently updated source of high quality DNA reference sequences. It has been an invaluable resource, especially for 18S rRNA research groups, since the RDP has not updated their 18S database for many years. SILVA is the new gold standard for rRNA analyses.

3. This a great service to the community that you provide and you should be commended for it!

4. I appreciate the smaller NR data set that can be loaded into ARB. This has allowed me to actually work with the data set on my computer (that has limited memory). Highlighting key species in red or blue has been incredibly helpful for building trees. This is fantastic. It would be really useful to be able to create a small dataset that contains just the type species. This would be particularly helpful for making smaller phylogenetic trees. I have found the sequence alignments from Silva to be the most representative and contain the fewest errors and has become our institute's preferred alignment. Overall Silva is an incredible resource that is crucial to my research and my understanding of the microbial ecology and systematics. Thank you.
   • Please have a look at the “All Species Living Tree Project” which contains only typespecies.
5. SILVA war eine der nützlichsten Erfindungen für Umweltforscher die Molekularbiologie benutzen. So einfach war Bäume basteln noch nie! Sie müssen unbedingt weiter machen! Was bei einer Projektpause passiert ist gut an RDP zu erkennen (wo man sich redlich bemüht, wirklich!) Liebe DFG: Besser kann man sein Geld kaum anlegen!
6. SILVA and ARB have been the backbone of my research for the last 6 years and I would not have been able to accomplish my work without it. It is an incredible resource for all microbial ecologists and I sincerely hope that the developing/working group gets all the funding it needs to continue the improvements!
7. Of all of my responses listed in the survey, the one that I consider the most important to my research would be to enhance the search functions. I am an experienced ARB user, but seem to have constant difficulty searching SILVA for sequence sets that I know exist. Thank you - great work, Frank et al
8. As user, I would like to have my sequence checked before submission to embl by a web-based quality check, e.g. a pintail service. If all users do in the process of assembling the full sequence, the overall quality will improve.
9. The datasets are getting so large now that it is straining the computer resources available to individuals on limited budgets. Allowing on-line analyses would be of great benefit to all users.

The complete list of comments and suggestions plus some more answers can be found here (PDF).