NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – In hopes of improving data sharing between institutions for genomic data analysis, the US Food and Drug Administration and a research consortium led by George Washington University have released a framework for communicating high-throughput sequencing computations and data analysis.
Called the BioCompute Object Specification Document, this would-be standard is an attempt to streamline data and workflow exchange between the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and bioinformatics technology developers in the context of regulatory submissions.
The research consortium and the FDA published the specification document last night on the Open Science Framework site. A companion, preprint commentary on so-called BioCompute Objects appears on BioRxiv.
"We want to make it as easy to get the exact parameters for biocomputation as it is to get a recipe for salmon," Raja Mazumder, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine at the GWU School of Medicine and Health Sciences, said in a statement. "With standards for [BioCompute Objects], researchers will receive better information when comparing or building on existing research. It will allow all bioinformatics researchers to know the important components of the 'recipe,' so everyone is speaking the same language."
Other participants in the effort included Harvard Medical School, the University of Manchester in the UK, biomedical data analytics company Seven Bridges, and the European Union's BioExcel Centre for Excellence.