Abstract
A vast and rich body of information has grown up as a result of the world's enthusiasm for 'omics technologies. Finding ways to describe and make available this information that maximise its usefulness has become a major effort across the 'omics world. At the heart of this effort is the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), an open-membership organization that drives community-based standardization activities, Here we provide a short history of the GSC, provide an overview of its range of current activities, and make a call for the scientific community to join forces to improve the quality and quantity of contextual information about our public collections of genomes, metagenomes, and marker gene sequences.
Highlights
We currently have thousands of genomes, hundreds of metagenomes, and tens of thousands of marker gene data sets in the public domain, and these numbers are rapidly increasing [1]
This stewardship must include enriching public sequence databases with the biological context of these sequences (Box 1), which will in turn necessitate the adoption of a fresh attitude to reporting results, both in our papers and our submissions to the public databases
Well-contextualized genome, metagenome, and marker gene data sets provide ideal opportunities for comparison and contrasting using computational means to solve a wide range of questions in biology
Summary
We currently have thousands of genomes, hundreds of metagenomes, and tens of thousands of marker gene data sets in the public domain, and these numbers are rapidly increasing [1]. Well-contextualized genome, metagenome, and marker gene data sets (e.g., ribosomal gene surveys) provide ideal opportunities for comparison and contrasting using computational means to solve a wide range of questions in biology (including questions in medicine, physiology, developmental biology, biogeochemistry, evolution, ecology, etc.). These data sets should be treated as part of a larger whole—a catalogue of life on earth—that will allow us to observe, as we sample in time and space, how life changes. The GSC works closely with a range of related communities and helped drive the formation of the Environment Ontology [24], the Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) initiative [2], and most recently the BioSharing forum [3, 25]
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