With the MIGS/MIMS specifications the Genomic Standards Consortium has finished the groundwork to enrich our genome and metagenome collections with contextual data. Now, it is time to consider whether these standards could be applied ‘as is’ in the short-term, and ‘with modification/extension’ in the longer-term to any genetic marker sequence retrieved from the environment. To move for ward and leverage existing interest in the community the proposal for MIENS, the ‘Minimum Information about an ENvironmental Sequence’, has been accepted as a natural extension to MIGS and MIMS on the 6th GSC meeting in October 2008. MIENS is meant to be fully compliant with the attributes already accepted by the MIGS/MIMS standards, but it is also intended to identify additional contextual data fields that are needed to enrich our ever growing set of environ mental marker gene sequences. It was decided, to take the ribosomal RNA sequence collections (16S/18S & 23S/28S) as a first use case. By supplementing our sequence collections with more contextual data, it will be possible to retrieve, for example, all 16S sequences related to specific environmental parameters (i.e. location, habitat type, temperature, salinity, oxygen concentration etc.). A MIENS working group has been established to tackle the following key aspects: 1. Identify which INSDC/MIGS/MIMS contextual data at tributes for environmental sequences are most relevant for the community 2. Identification of additional contextual data to be covered by MIENS. This leads to generating a checklist for MIENS indicating the significance of the attributes. 3. Implementation of MIENS: Definition of field names and description of fields and extension of GCDML 4. Collaborate with INSDC to define the modus of sequence & contextual data submission 5. Provide tools for effective sequence & contextual data submission More information can be found on the GSC WIKI page: http://gensc.org/gc_wiki/index.php/MIENS Field, D., G. Garrity, T. Gray, N. Morrison, J. Selengut, P. Sterk, T. Tatusova, N. Thomson, M. J. Allen, S. V. Angiuoli, et al. 2008. The minimum information about a genome sequence (MIGS) specification. Nat. Biotechnol. 26:541-547.
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