The agency is providing the material freely and asking for feedback, so it can fix possible problems before more widely disseminating it to labs and companies.
Having raised $1.5 million in funding since announcing the project at a 2017 AACR meeting, the group anticipates completing the first phase of the project by Q2 2020.
Investigators concluded that the spiked samples from SeraCare were a robust tool for inter-lab comparisons and discussed some areas of discordance seen in the study.
A bill passed by a US House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee would give scientific agencies including the National Science Foundation boosts in funding.
The methods address challenges like recall and precision, comparing different representations of variant calls, and stratifying performance by variant type and genome context.
