Meeting report from the genomic standards consortium (GSC) workshop 8

Abstract

This report summarizes the proceedings of the 8th meeting of the Genomic Standards Con-sortium held at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, CA, USA on September 9-11, 2009. This three-day workshop marked the maturing of Genomic Stan-dards Consortium from an informal gathering of researchers interested in developing stan-dards in the field of genomic and metagenomics to an established community with a defined governance mechanism, its own open access journal, and a family of established standards for describing genomes, metagenomes and marker studies (i.e. ribosomal RNA gene surveys). There will be increased efforts within the GSC to reach out to the wider scientific community via a range of new projects. Further information about the GSC and its activities can be found at http://gensc.org/.