Workshop: Curation of Genomic Sequence Data for Deposition to a Public Data Repository

This workshop is designed for new curators of viral and bacterial pathogen nucleotide sequence-related data. This workshop is designed for people new to preparing data for submission to an international database, such as NCBI's GenBank or Sequence Read Archive (SRA).

One of NCBI's primary mission is to accelerate discovery and advance health through data-driven research. To support this goal, NCBI collects nucleotide sequence data from the scientific community and makes it accessible to support scientific, public health and clinical discoveries, thus positively impacting human health. Over the years, NCBI staff have worked with data submitters all over the world to assist them in creating submission packages of high-quality sequence and associated metadata for deposition in NCBI's GenBank (assembled and annotated sequences) and the SRA (high-throughput sequence read data).

With this expertise in mind, NCBI aims to assist the Africa CDC in training curators who will work with African researchers to assess and prepare their nucleotide sequence data for inclusion in one of various international nucleotide sequence repositories. This work is essential to catalog and provide access to critical biodiversity information sampled across the African continent and to assist in the surveillance of viral and bacterial pathogens that may impact human health.

In this workshop you will learn how to:

• Understand the purpose of the cuator's job and potential impact on science and human health.
• Prepare high-throughput read data for submission to an appropriate database, such as SRA.
  • Identify requirements for submitting to SRA
  • Assess sequence data and metadata quality
  • Know what additional metadata to request
  • Validate the source organism
  • Filter out contaminating human sequences to produce a high-quality viral or bacterial sample sequence
  • Format the data for submission to SRA-like database
• Prepare curated sequence data for submission to an appropriate database, such as GenBank.
  • Identify requirements for submitting to GenBank
  • Assess sequence data and metadata quality
  • Know what additional metadata to request
  • Validate the source organism
  • Format the data for submission to GenBank-like database
• Understand where and how the submitted information may be accessed with examples of how it can be used to benefit public health.