News and Announcements

This page is for news items relating to the European Nucleotide Archive and service announcements.

ENA Service Announcement - Webin downtime (24-07-2024)

Webin submissions via Webin-CLI, Webin Interactive and Webin REST are scheduled to go down due to planned maintenance from 10:00hrs on 01-AUG-2024. Maintenance should be complete by 17:00hrs, please get in touch if you notice submissions issues beyond this time.

ENA News - INSDC publishes guidance for prospective new members (20-05-2024)

The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) recognizes the critical importance of sequence data to research and public health, and supports global open-access sequence data sharing through collaboration. Sequence data has become an integral component of multiple life science disciplines and sequence data generation continues to increase at significant rates. With this in mind, INSDC aims to broaden its membership and attract diverse new members representing qualified nucleotide sequence databases.

In support of this effort, INSDC formalized the collaboration through the development of a Founders Arrangement and a Membership Arrangement. These documents, including new and updated content about the INSDC mission, vision, governance, and technical documentation, are now publicly available on the INSDC website at www.insdc.org to enable interested parties from around the world to evaluate their readiness to participate and enhance global sequence data sharing. Two levels of INSDC membership are possible, as described in the Membership Agreement: Full and Associate membership.

Founding Members of the INSDC will provide consultation to interested parties as prospective members will be required to demonstrate appropriate capacity, commitment, and activity in areas such as governance, technical infrastructure, data operations, and communications and engagement. Interested parties are encouraged to contact INSDC.

The INSDC is a long-standing initiative, and its Founding Members are the Research Organization of Information and Systems, National Institute of Genetics (ROIS-NIG) in Japan, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory – European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and the National Library of Medicine-National Center for Biotechnology Information (NLM-NCBI), a component of the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

ENA News - Improving spatiotemporal annotations (01-12-2024)

  • The European Nucleotide Archive, along with its partners in the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, is set to introduce mandatory spatio-temporal information for all new samples

  • The change aims to enrich the scientific value of the data, especially for scientists working in the areas of infectious disease, biodiversity and ecology

  • The team is seeking input from the community

To enrich the scientific value of the data it archives, the ENA will introduce mandatory spatio-temporal metadata for new data submissions. The drive for this change has come from the user community, specifically from researchers working in the fields of infectious disease, ecology and biodiversity, for whom this information is particularly valuable because it allows them to correlate genotypes to specific environmental conditions (see also https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/press-releases/ena-new-metadata).

This change will serve over time to increase the level to which datasets in ENA are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).

Over the coming year, all new submissions to ENA will require the following information for each sample:

  • The country or region where the sample was collected, using standardised country names from a controlled list.

  • The collection date of the sample, recording at least the year of collection.

This change will only apply to new submissions, and will not be imposed retrospectively. The goal is to ensure this for all new sequences by the end of 2022.

Although the spatio-temporal information will become mandatory in most cases, some exceptions will be allowed when it is deemed necessary and the exception indicated to users.

ENA users are invited to submit their feedback to ena-collaborations@ebi.ac.uk.

Further details regarding the change will be released on or before 1 April 2022.

The INSDC announcement on this topic available at https://www.insdc.org/spatio-temporal-annotation-policy-18-11-2021