The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) is an open-membership working body formed in September 2005. The aim of the GSC is making genomic data discoverable. The GSC enables genomic data integration, discovery and comparison through international community-driven standards.
This project is maintained by GenomicsStandardsConsortium
The GSC family of minimum information standards (checklists) are collectively referred to as MIxS (Minimum Information about any (x) Sequence).
We have defined a set of core descriptors for genomes, metagenomes and the samples thereof. The intention is to enable the capture of an extended level of metadata to that already captured by the INSDC archives.
In addition to the sequence related metadata that forms the core of the checklists, we also provide environmental package “extensions” of recomended terms that aim to standardize sets of measurements and observations describing particular sampling events and habitats. These extensions are applicable across any and/or all of MIxS checklists.
In addition to the Checklists page on this website; where we given generic information and history, with every new release the standards documentation pages (giving details of all the terms associated with each checklist) are generated and made available here
The MIxS checklists github repository is where future versions are discussed and developed, please feel free to join the discussion using the github issue tracker. In addition there are more techincal speficication available in the GitHub Wiki
In order to encourage more comprehensive metadata inclusion with sequence data the GSC have facilitated the development of many extensions that can be used in addition to the Minimum Information for each checklist. These extensions consist of many recomended terms that have been compiled by experts in the relevant field of research. Explore all the ready made checklist extensions that we have available. If there is not a suitable checklist already available and you are interested in developing your own extention, then please read our implementation page containing details on Developing Extensions with us.
The complete set of terms defined across all of the checklists and packages can be found here. If you are interested in a specific term or terms, we provide a simple search function to aid you in finding the relevant term(s).
You can find all previous versions of the checklists in our mixs-legacy GitHub repository.