About GSC

GSC Mission

Community-driven standards have the best chance of success if developed within the auspices of international working groups. Participants in the GSC include biologists, computer scientists, those building genomic databases and conducting large-scale comparative genomic analyses, and those with experience of building community-based standards.

The mission of the GSC is to work towards:

Making genomic data discoverable
Enabling genomic data integration, discovery and comparison through international community-driven standards

Background

Without specific guidelines, most genomic, metagenomic and marker gene sequences in databases are sparsely annotated with the information required to guide data integration, comparative studies and knowledge generation. Even with complex keyword searches, it is currently impossible to reliably retrieve sequences that have originated from certain environments or particular locations on Earth—for example, all sequences from “soil” or “freshwater lakes” in a certain region of the world. Because public sequence repositories (INSDC, MG-RAST, GOLD…) depend on author-submitted information to enrich the value of sequence data sets, we argue that the only way to change the current practice is to establish a standard of reporting that requires contextual (meta)data to be deposited at the time of sequence submission. The adoption of such a standard would elevate the quality, accessibility and utility of information that can be collected from INSDC or any other data repository.

The GSC has defined a set of core descriptors for genomes and metagenomes in the form of MIGS/MIMS specification. MIGS/MIMS extends the minimum information already captured by the INSDC. More recently introduced MIMARKS captures information about marker genes. Additionally, we also introduced “environmental packages” that standardize sets of measurements and observations describing particular habitats that are applicable across all GSC checklists and beyond. We define ‘environment’ as any location in which a sample or organism is found, e.g., soil, air, water, human-associated, plant-associated or laboratory. The environmental packages are relevant to any sequence of known origin and are designed to be used in combination with MIGS, MIMS and MIMARKS checklists.

Governance and Bylaws

Please see our Governance and Bylaws section for details of how the GSC is governed and the bylaws the consortium abide by.

Board

The GSC Board was established in April 2009 to improve communication within the GSC, build GSC strategy, help move this community towards formalization (long-term sustainability, transparency and vision), improve community-level representation and help foster strategic partnerships with other communities. The current GSC board, Alumni Board Members as well as members of our Advisory Board are all listed on this page.

Community

The GSC has an open membership policy. If you would like to join the GSC, please contact the Secretary by clicking on Contact on the menubar. We also recommend that you subscribe to the GSC’s general mailing list.