Don't just dump your data and run: Authors should submit as much experimental information as possible when uploading sequence data.

Abstract

If you have, in any way, been involved with genetic research over the past 10 years, then you have likely heard of the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), which is jointly housed at the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI), the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). And if you regularly work with genome or transcriptome sequence information, then you have probably extracted data from and/or deposited data into the SRA. For those who are unfamiliar with it, the SRA is an international public online archive for next‐generation sequencing (NGS) data, which was established about a decade ago under the guidance of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) [1], [2]. Despite nearly being shut down in 2011 [3], it has grown at a staggering rate over the past 10 years. As of September 1, 2017, it housed over five quadrillion (1015) open‐access bases of NGS data, coming from thousands of different species and spanning the entire gamut of cellular and viral life. It contains DNA‐ and RNA‐sequencing (DNA‐seq and RNA‐seq) reads of every kind, from bisulfite‐seq to strand‐specific RNA‐seq to single‐cell DNA‐seq, and it accepts reads from every type of NGS platform, be it Illumina, Ion Torrent, or PacBio sequencing. In other words, the SRA is a crucial and central resource in the fast‐paced and increasingly important domain of contemporary genetic research. > … the SRA is a crucial and central resource in the fast‐paced and increasingly important domain of contemporary genetic research. ### The Sequence Read Archive The SRA can be easily accessed and searched via the NCBI (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra), DDBJ (http://trace.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/dra/index_e.html), and EBI (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/submit/read-submission) websites. Once there, you will find yourself at a sequencing‐read superstore. With a decent Wi‐Fi connection, a couple of keyword searches, and a few clicks of the trackpad, you can quickly …