The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) is an open-membership working body formed in September 2005. The aim of the GSC is making genomic data discoverable. The GSC enables genomic data integration, discovery and comparison through international community-driven standards. Learn more on the Gensc.org/About page.
GSC meetings
The GSC host annual international meetings to promote the use of standards in the life sciences and beyond, with a particular emphasis on sequence data sharing.
Each annual meeting is themed around a topic or topics that are relevant to the host organisation and local participants. This year the underlying theme will be the Challenges of Reproducibility in Genomics, and how the use of standards can help overcome those challenges.
With the recent movement in the FAIR principles arena towards focusing on machine-readable and actionable data, along with the commitments shown by various National funding agencies towards open and reproducible science, we hope our choice of topic will enable networking of relevant players from standards organisations, funders, and researchers to further the discussions and facilitate a coherent movement towards a more robust future for scientific discovery and dissemination.
This meeting is intended for academic, corporate, and government professionals in the fields of medical genomics, environmental genomics, metagenomics, and microbiome sciences, tackling technical, metadata, and reproducibility challenges related to sample collection, processing, and genomic sequencing workflows critical for small- and large-scale datasets. Attendance for the GSC25 annual meeting is expected to be between 100 and 150 participants.
GSC past meetings
Please see GSC24-Tucson and GSC23-Bangkok for the previous two GSC meetings.
GSC25 Cambridge
The GSC 2025 annual meeting will be held in Clare College, Cambridge University, Cambridge UK.
GSC25 Daily Agenda Overview:
- July 28 GSC board meeting – GSC board dinner (invite only)
- July 29 GSC main meeting - Impacts and Opening Reception
- July 30 GSC main meeting - GSC Standards
- July 31 GSC main meeting - Forward Focused, AI, Genomics and Standards
- August 1 GSC Working group meetings (separate registration required)
Meeting Sessions Theme:
- The implementation of new community-driven genomic standards
- The establishment of methods of capturing and exchanging metadata
- Harmonization of metadata collection and analysis efforts across the wider genomics community
- Developing and making available standards-related resources and tools to help leverage the exponentially increasing amount of genomics and metagenomics datasets
- Implementing standards for reproducibility across all areas of genomics