In January 2020, the workshop on Ocean nucleic acids 'omics intercalibration and standardization was convened by the US Ocean Carbon Biogeochemistry (OCB) program. The goal of this workshop was to develop a focused marine microbial nucleic acid (na) 'omics intercomparison and intercalibration effort to enhance future field programs that integrate methods such as molecular barcoding, metagenomics and transcriptomics to understand the functioning of prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbes in the ocean. Initial efforts are guided, in part, by the success of the marine geochemistry community in implementing programs like GEOTRACES.