The Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) Project: Metadata, Data Sharing and the FAANG Data Portal

The Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) Project aims, through a coordinated international effort, to provide high quality functional annotation of animal genomes with a focus on the livestock community. The project standardises core assays, experimental protocols and analysis methods to maximise effectiveness and inter-comparability of assay data, supporting the community to create this rich genome to phenome resource. A key advantage of the project is its focus on ensuring high quality and rich supporting metadata to describe the project's animals, specimens, cell cultures and experimental assays. It achieves this through metadata validation tools (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/vg/faang/validate/) that ensure submissions meet the FAANG minimal standards (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/vg/faang/rule_sets/FAANG). It also encourages early registration of samples and pre-publication of data in the appropriate archives in line with FAANG’s data release policy (http://www.faang.org/data-share-principle). Here we present the first version of the FAANG data portal, created and hosted by the Data Coordination Centre (DCC) at EMBL-EBI. The data portal collates and displays the project’s rich sample and experimental data. It provides direct links to all released assay data and as analysis results are collected, will provide added value resources such as a visual display of data through TrackHubs. The portal provides powerful filtering and searching, drawing in existing livestock datasets from a range of external resources and leverages recent and ongoing advances by Ensembl and the Molecular Archive cluster at EMBL-EBI for the display and identification of livestock data.