The Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes, Data Standards, Annotation and Sharing

The most significant challenge in the post-genomic era is connecting genotype to quantitative phenotype in basic and applied biology - the Genome to Phenome challenge. The Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes Consortium (FAANG) aims to bring together the Animal Genomics community to produce functional annotation across a range of animal genomes, providing the community with data and analysis to address this question.

We describe the FAANG consortium’s aims and how we envision data standards, storage, annotation and sharing developing within the consortium, ensuring members of the consortium and the wider community can take maximum benefit from the datasets that FAANG creates.

FAANG's experimental, meta data and bioinformatics standards will ensure the data produced by FAANG members can be compared and integrated. These standards will build on those defined by established projects like ENCODE and the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC). FAANG will adapt these standards to ensure they are appropriate for the animal genomes being annotated.

FAANG also seeks to ensure the consortium data is widely used by the community. FAANG members will share data produced in an open access manner, rapidly and before publication in adherence to the standards defined at the Toronto International Data Release Workshop. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7261/full/461168a.html). To facilitate data sharing FAANG will engage with major genome analysis groups such as Ensembl and encourage data sharing via the TrackHub standard used by ENCODE and IHEC to allow users to visualize the data in a genomic context. The consortium will work to present all FAANG data in a unified manner to ensure the community has a central point to discover what data has been generated.