Public Library of Science, PLoS Biology, 6(9), p. e1001088, 2011
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001088
Full text: Download
© The Author(s), 2011. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in PLoS Biology 9 (2011): e1001088, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001088. ; 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. ; NERC International Opportunities Fund Award NE/3521773/1 and NE/E007325/1 (http://www.nerc. ac.uk/funding/) and National Science Foundation grant RCN4GSC, DBI-0840989 (http://www.nsf.gov/funding/).