ATCC launches portal of reference-quality genome sequences

The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) has launched the ATCC Genome Portal, a publicly available database of reference-quality genome sequences matched to authenticated ATCC biological materials that will help researchers interpret and reproduce their results with confidence. Launched with an initial 250 genome sequences of widely used bacterial strains, the portal delivers on ATCC’s Enhanced Authentication Initiative, which is aimed at increasing reproducibility in biological research.

Current publicly available genomic sequences lack authenticity, quality, completeness or traceability, which can compromise results. This problem is exacerbated by the absence of standardised methods for developing and validating reference-quality genome sequences.

ATCC addressed this issue by developing a standardised workflow for generating reference-quality genomes. Starting with low-passaged, authenticated ATCC materials and using a standardised next-generation sequencing and hybrid assembly approach, ATCC produced complete reference-quality genomes by combining highly accurate short reads with the scaffolding ability of ultralong reads. Each step of this workflow undergoes rigorous quality control analyses to ensure that the data proceeding to the next step are the highest quality possible — only data that pass all quality control criteria are published to the ATCC Genome Portal.

“For scientists to accurately interpret their results and make insightful correlations with in silico models, they need access to rigorously validated reference genomes that are tied back to credible biological materials,” said Dr Joseph Leonelli, Vice President, ATCC Federal Solutions.

“Through our Enhanced Authentication Initiative, we have identified the key challenges with existing publicly available data and have developed a solution for improving the quality of reference genome sequences. We are excited and proud to be able to offer this resource to the scientific community.”

Researchers can download high-quality genome sequences for use in bioinformatic analyses, view annotated data and search for genomes using their own data. ATCC will continuously update the portal with additional genomes as they become available.

You can register for the ATCC Genome Portal and explore the database by visiting https://genomes.atcc.org/.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/ymgerman

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