Biodata resources are critical to the progress of life science and biomedical research. The Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) recently announced its first set of Global Core Biodata Resources (GCBRs). There are 37 GCBRs that an international peer-review panel considers essential for the global research community and the preservation of biological data. These repositories include deposition databases, which archive and preserve primary research data, and knowledge bases, which add value to these data through expert curation and annotation.
The GBC was formed in 2020 as a consortium of international research funders dedicated to better understanding the global biodata resource ecosystem and moving toward more internationally coordinated, sustainable, and streamlined mechanisms to support that ecosystem. This includes creating a long-term sustainability plan to ensure that GCBRs are always available to researchers worldwide.
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) funds 16 of the 37 GCBRs:
- Alliance of Genome Resources
- Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen)
- FlyBase
- GENCODE
- Gene Ontology (GO)
- Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD)
- GWAS Catalog (the NHGRI-EBI Catalog of human genome-wide association studies)
- HGNC: HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee
- MGD: Mouse Genome Database
- PharmGKB: Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase
- Reactome
- Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD)
- UCSC Genome Browser
- UniProt
- WormBase
- ZFIN: The Zebrafish Information Network
All of these resources provide free and open access to their data. It is important to note that GCBRs have either terms of use or specific licenses that conform to the Open Definition, allowing for data reuse. Data reuse ensures that the research community has access to the data to advance scientific understanding and discoveries.
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~Ansuman Chattopadhyay