Report of the 13(th) Genomic Standards Consortium Meeting, Shenzhen, China, March 4-7, 2012.

Jack A Gilbert,Corrie Moreau,Robert Robbins,Folker Meyer,Peter Sterk,Lynn M Schriml,Yiming Bao,Scott C Edmunds,Daniel P Smith,Ilene Mizrachi,Hui Wang,George M Garrity,Dawn Field,Susanna-Assunta Sansone,Jared Wilkening,Neil Davies,Norman Morrison

doi:10.4056/sigs.2876184

Abstract

This report details the outcome of the 13th Meeting of the Genomic Standards Consortium. The three-day conference was held at the Kingkey Palace Hotel, Shenzhen, China, on March 5–7, 2012, and was hosted by the Beijing Genomics Institute. The meeting, titled From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models, highlighted the role of data standards associated with genomic, metagenomic, and amplicon sequence data and the contextual information associated with the sample. To this end the meeting focused on genomic projects for animals, plants, fungi, and viruses; metagenomic studies in host-microbe interactions; and the dynamics of microbial communities. In addition, the meeting hosted a Genomic Observatories Network session, a Genomic Standards Consortium biodiversity working group session, and a Microbiology of the Built Environment session sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Highlights

The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) held its 13th GSC workshop, From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models in Shenzhen, China, on March 5–7, 2012
The keynote address was provided by Rita Colwell (University of Maryland, USA), who highlighted the power of genomics and metagenomics in uncovering human disease, through comparative genomics of Vibrio species, and the use of the metagenomics to determine the environmental etiology of persistent diseases in developing countries
He described a new U.S National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) initiative that is helping the scientific community deal with sequencing data volumes in pathogenic virus databases through the support of two resource programs: the Genome Sequence Centers for Infec-Standards in Genomic Sciences tious Diseases (GSCID), which provides sequencing and analysis services for sample sets of pathogenic microorganisms and invertebrate vectors of disease, and the Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRC), which integrates genome sequence data with related relevant information to the pathogen research communities

Summary

Introduction

The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) held its 13th GSC workshop, From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models in Shenzhen, China, on March 5–7, 2012. The keynote address was provided by Rita Colwell (University of Maryland, USA), who highlighted the power of genomics and metagenomics in uncovering human disease, through comparative genomics of Vibrio species, and the use of the metagenomics to determine the environmental etiology of persistent diseases in developing countries She emphasized the need to use the myriad tools available to us to explore the world in which we live, including the use of satellite mapping to explore remote sensing of microbial dynamics and infection potential via environmental events. Richard Scheuermann (University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, USA) highlighted existing efforts to standardize the recording of pathogenic virus sequence data and metadata He described a new U.S National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) initiative that is helping the scientific community deal with sequencing data volumes in pathogenic virus databases through the support of two resource programs: the Genome Sequence Centers for Infec-. UNITE [19] is a fungal rDNA ITS sequence database hosted by the PlutoF cloud [20]

Evening session

Findings

Virus standards working group