The FAANG Data Portal: Global, Open-Access, "FAIR", and Richly Validated Genotype to Phenotype Data for High-Quality Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes

The Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes (FAANG) project is a worldwide coordinated action creating high-quality functional annotation of farmed and companion animal genomes. The generation of a rich genome-to-phenome resource and supporting informatic infrastructure advances the scope of comparative genomics and furthers the understanding of functional elements. The project also provides terrestrial and aquatic animal agriculture community powerful resources for supporting improvements to farmed animal production, disease resistance, and genetic diversity. The FAANG Data Portal (https://data.faang.org) ensures Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) open access to the wealth of sample, sequencing, and analysis data produced by an ever-growing number of FAANG consortia. It is developed and maintained by the FAANG Data Coordination Centre (DCC) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). FAANG projects produce a standardised set of multi-omic assays with resulting data placed into a range of specialised open data archives. To ensure this data is easily findable and accessible by the community, the portal automatically identifies and collates all submitted FAANG data into a single easily searchable resource. The Data Portal supports direct download from the multiple underlying archives to enable seamless access to all FAANG data from within the portal itself. The portal provides a range of predefined filters, powerful predictive search, and a catalogue of sampling and analysis protocols and automatically identifies publications associated with any dataset. To ensure all FAANG data submissions are high-quality, the portal includes powerful contextual metadata validation and data submissions brokering to the underlying EMBL-EBI archives. The portal will incorporate extensive new technical infrastructure to effectively deliver and standardise FAANG's shift to single-cellomics, cell atlases, pangenomes, and novel phenotypic prediction models. The Data Portal plays a key role for FAANG by supporting high-quality functional annotation of animal genomes, through open FAIR sharing of data, complete with standardised rich metadata. Future Data Portal features developed by the DCC will support new technological developments for continued improvement for FAANG projects.

FAANG, establishing metadata standards, validation and best practices for the farmed and companion animal community

The Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes (FAANG) project aims, through a coordinated international effort, to provide high quality functional annotation of animal genomes with an initial focus on farmed and companion animals. A key goal of the initiative is to ensure high quality and rich supporting metadata to describe the project's animals, specimens, cell cultures and experimental assays. By defining rich sample and experimental metadata standards and promoting best practices in data descriptions, deposition and openness, FAANG champions higher quality and reusability of published datasets. FAANG has established a Data Coordination Centre, which sits at the heart of the Metadata and Data Sharing Committee. It continues to evolve the metadata standards, support submissions and, crucially, create powerful and accessible tools to support deposition and validation of metadata. FAANG conforms to the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data principles, with high quality, open access and functionally interlinked data. In addition to data generated by FAANG members and specific FAANG projects, existing datasets that meet the main—or more permissive legacy—standards are incorporated into a central, focused, functional data resource portal for the entire farmed and companion animal community. Through clear and effective metadata standards, validation and conversion software, combined with promotion of best practices in metadata implementation, FAANG aims to maximise effectiveness and inter‐comparability of assay data. This supports the community to create a rich genome‐to‐phenotype resource and promotes continuing improvements in animal data standards as a whole.