About us
Learn how GA4GH helps expand responsible genomic data use to benefit human health.
Learn how GA4GH helps expand responsible genomic data use to benefit human health.
Our Strategic Road Map defines strategies, standards, and policy frameworks to support responsible global use of genomic and related health data.
Discover how a meeting of 50 leaders in genomics and medicine led to an alliance uniting more than 5,000 individuals and organisations to benefit human health.
GA4GH Inc. is a not-for-profit organisation that supports the global GA4GH community.
The GA4GH Council, consisting of the Executive Committee, Strategic Leadership Committee, and Product Steering Committee, guides our collaborative, globe-spanning alliance.
The Funders Forum brings together organisations that offer both financial support and strategic guidance.
The EDI Advisory Group responds to issues raised in the GA4GH community, finding equitable, inclusive ways to build products that benefit diverse groups.
Distributed across a number of Host Institutions, our staff team supports the mission and operations of GA4GH.
Curious who we are? Meet the people and organisations across six continents who make up GA4GH.
More than 500 organisations connected to genomics — in healthcare, research, patient advocacy, industry, and beyond — have signed onto the mission and vision of GA4GH as Organisational Members.
These core Organisational Members are genomic data initiatives that have committed resources to guide GA4GH work and pilot our products.
This subset of Organisational Members whose networks or infrastructure align with GA4GH priorities has made a long-term commitment to engaging with our community.
Local and national organisations assign experts to spend at least 30% of their time building GA4GH products.
Anyone working in genomics and related fields is invited to participate in our inclusive community by creating and using new products.
Wondering what GA4GH does? Learn how we find and overcome challenges to expanding responsible genomic data use for the benefit of human health.
Study Groups define needs. Participants survey the landscape of the genomics and health community and determine whether GA4GH can help.
Work Streams create products. Community members join together to develop technical standards, policy frameworks, and policy tools that overcome hurdles to international genomic data use.
GIF solves problems. Organisations in the forum pilot GA4GH products in real-world situations. Along the way, they troubleshoot products, suggest updates, and flag additional needs.
NIF finds challenges and opportunities in genomics at a global scale. National programmes meet to share best practices, avoid incompatabilities, and help translate genomics into benefits for human health.
Communities of Interest find challenges and opportunities in areas such as rare disease, cancer, and infectious disease. Participants pinpoint real-world problems that would benefit from broad data use.
Find out what’s happening with up to the minute meeting schedules for the GA4GH community.
See all our products — always free and open-source. Do you work on cloud genomics, data discovery, user access, data security or regulatory policy and ethics? Need to represent genomic, phenotypic, or clinical data? We’ve got a solution for you.
All GA4GH standards, frameworks, and tools follow the Product Development and Approval Process before being officially adopted.
Learn how other organisations have implemented GA4GH products to solve real-world problems.
Help us transform the future of genomic data use! See how GA4GH can benefit you — whether you’re using our products, writing our standards, subscribing to a newsletter, or more.
Help create new global standards and frameworks for responsible genomic data use.
Align your organisation with the GA4GH mission and vision.
Want to advance both your career and responsible genomic data sharing at the same time? See our open leadership opportunities.
Join our international team and help us advance genomic data use for the benefit of human health.
Share your thoughts on all GA4GH products currently open for public comment.
Solve real problems by aligning your organisation with the world’s genomics standards. We offer software dvelopers both customisable and out-of-the-box solutions to help you get started.
Learn more about upcoming GA4GH events. See reports and recordings from our past events.
Speak directly to the global genomics and health community while supporting GA4GH strategy.
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Read news, stories, and insights from the forefront of genomic and clinical data use.
Attend an upcoming GA4GH event, or view meeting reports from past events.
See new projects, updates, and calls for support from the Work Streams.
Read academic papers coauthored by GA4GH contributors.
Listen to our podcast OmicsXchange, featuring discussions from leaders in the world of genomics, health, and data sharing.
Check out our videos, then subscribe to our YouTube channel for more content.
View the latest GA4GH updates, Genomics and Health News, Implementation Notes, GDPR Briefs, and more.
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When a researcher downloads a genomic dataset, they typically get CRAM or VCF documents, which are the results of a sequencing experiment. However, these files contain little information on the nature of the experiment itself: are the data from whole genome sequencing, transcriptomics, or another kind of experiment? Are the data for a bulk sequencing or single cell assay? Have techniques been applied to target specific regions of the genome?
Without metadata explaining the context, researchers cannot make sense of results from experiments in genomics, epigenomics, and more. The GA4GH Discovery Work Stream is aiming to produce a minimal checklist of metadata needed to characterise -omics datasets. The Experiments Metadata Standard will provide a dictionary of properties that makes it easier to search for experiments and to understand their results for analysis.
To learn more about the project, including areas of focus, plans for the first phase, and topics that are out of scope, visit here.
Researchers, clinicians, clinical laboratories, data generators, data custodians, data access committees, developers, and research institutes
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The goal of the Experiments Metadata Standard is to provide enough information to understand what a genomics experiment is about, without getting into the specifics of how to make it reproducible. It will recommend a checklist of properties that need to be captured about high-throughput sequencing assays, making use of relevant ontologies when possible. The checklist will be built in an modular and extensible way, so as to allow getting into the specifics of a given experimental technique, and so that users can adapt it to their own particular projects and methods yet to be covered.
The Experiments Metadata Standard will provide a way to organise key information, facilitating the organisation, understanding, discovery, and analysis of genomics data, which can especially be challenging when integrating data from multiple providers. The standard can also help point out biases by making clear which instrument or sequencing technique was used to produce the experimental results.
This group meets to build a checklist of metadata properties that need to be captured by high-throughput-sequencing methods. Meets on the first Monday of every month.
Catch up with all news and articles associated with Experiments Metadata Standard.