Enhanced Authentication Initiative

Your research is important. Your data can inspire incredible breakthroughs and improve human lives throughout the world. Don’t let crowd-sourced genomic data generated using unauthenticated materials limit your discoveries.

Reproducible research starts with credible biological materials. That’s why we have made a commitment to the scientific community to provide reference-quality, whole-genome sequencing data through the ATCC Genome Portal. Our Enhanced Authentication Initiative not only enriches the characterization of our biological collections by using next-generation sequencing but also includes making those data available to everyone. We hope our credible materials paired with whole-genome sequences lead to easier scientific collaboration, greater confidence in experimental outcomes, and better reproducibility in research.

Explore our resources below to learn more about our standardized approach to genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation.  If you have a specific organism from the ATCC repository that you would like us sequence and publish on the ATCC Genome Portal, please send us a request.

Send a genome sequencing request

We have developed a solution for improving the reproducibility of your data: a workflow that pairs reference-quality genomes with authenticated ATCC materials. To make sure you have the highest-quality data possible for your research, we built and validated our workflow using state-of-the-art technologies combined with best practices for whole-genome sequencing.

What’s more, we have made our whole-genome sequences publicly available through the ATCC Genome Portal—that means easily finding the credible data you need for your research and having it ready to use. And because we know that making insightful correlations between your analyses and reference data is essential for making scientific breakthroughs, we have provided genome assembly statistics, quality metrics, and metadata for each of our reference-quality genomes.

While recent technological advancements have enabled the generation of vast amounts of whole-genome sequencing data, publicly available reference genomes often lack quality, completeness, authenticity, accuracy, and traceability. The reliability of these data are further called into question as they may have been generated using untraceable cultures and older methodologies. That’s why our Enhanced Authentication Initiative was focused on developing a standardized genome sequencing and assembly workflow to provide researchers with the whole-genome sequences of the specific, authenticated materials needed to generate credible data.

Our optimized methodology is designed to achieve complete, circularized (when biologically appropriate), and contiguous genomic elements by using short-read (virology collection) and hybrid (bacteriology and mycology collections) assembly techniques. We then take our workflow one step further by accompanying each stage of the process with rigorous quality control analyses that ensure the highest quality data. Only the data that passes all quality control criteria are published to the ATCC Genome Portal.

Read the Technical Document