Most successful research programs depend on easily accessible and standardized research infrastructures. Until recently, access to tissue or DNA samples with standardized metadata and of a sufficiently high quality, has been a major bottleneck for genomic research. The Global Geonome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) fills this critical gap by offering standardized, legal access to samples. Presently, GGBN’s core activity is enabling access to searchable DNA and tissue collections across natural history museums and botanic gardens. Activities are gradually being expanded to encompass all kinds of biodiversity biobanks such as culture collections, zoological gardens, aquaria, arboreta, and environmental biobanks. Broadly speaking, these collections all provide long-term storage and standardized public access to samples useful for molecular research. GGBN facilitates sample search and discovery for its distributed member collections through a single entry point. It stores standardized information on mostly geo-referenced, vouchered samples, their physical location, availability, quality, and the necessary legal information on over 50,000 species of Earth’s biodiversity, from unicellular to multicellular organisms. The GGBN Data Portal and the GGBN Data Standard are complementary to existing infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and International Nucleotide Sequence Database (INSDC). Today, many well-known open-source collection management databases such as Arctos, Specify, and Symbiota, are implementing the GGBN data standard. GGBN continues to increase its collections strategically, based on the needs of the research community, adding over 1.3 million online records in 2018 alone, and today two million sample data are available through GGBN. Together with Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), and Synthesis of Systematic Resources (SYNTHESYS+), GGBN provides best practices for biorepositories on meeting the requirements of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). By collaboration with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), GGBN is exploring options for tagging publications that reference GGBN collections and associated specimens, made searchable through GGBN’s document library. Through its collaborative efforts, standards, and best practices GGBN aims at facilitating trust and transparency in the use of genetic resources.

The aim of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN, http://www.ggbn.org) is to foster collaboration among biodiversity biobanks on a global scale in order to further compliance with standards, best practices, and to secure interoperability and exchange of material in accordance with national and international legislation and conventions. Thus, key aspects of GGBN’s mission are to develop a network of trusted collections, establishing standards, and identifying best practices by reaching out to other communities. This is especially critical in the light of new international legislation such as the recent Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS).Biological repositories such as but not limited to natural history collections, botanic gardens, culture collections and zoos are facing a series of challenges triggered by the rapid acceleration in sequencing technology that has put added pressure on the use of samples, which just a few years ago were considered inaccessible for sequencing.ABS legislation applies to nearly all collection types, and with biodiversity biobanks increasing in number worldwide, there is an urgent need to streamline procedures and to ensure legislative compliance. Within Europe it is necessary to 1) reach common standards for biodiversity and environmental biobanks; 2) define best practices for the use of molecular collections; and 3) try to ease exchange of samples and related information, while staying compliant with legislation and conventions.Within the EU funded SYNTHESYS+ project (http://www.synthesys.info), GGBN is leading Network Activity 3 (NA3). An overview of planned activities and tasks will be given here with special emphasis on linkages within and beyond SYNTHESYS+.

The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is a recently proposed international collaborative research initiative that aims to sequence the genomes of all ~1.5 million known eukaryotic species on Earth in 10 years. The project has been called “biology’s moonshot” because of its potential to transform our understanding of life on Earth, to provide new tools for the conservation, preservation and regeneration of biodiversity, and to drive innovations in agriculture, medicine and the delivery of ecosystem services. The presentation will highlight the many scientific opportunities and technical challenges foreseen for the EBP and the importance of global collaboration for success of the project.

GGBN, the Global Genome Biodiversity Network, is a consortium of virtually linked biodiversity biobanks that provide unified open access to their sample data through a web portal (www.ggbn.org), together improve best practices and develop standards. Since its inception in 2011, GGBN has largely been supported by external grants and in-kind support from its members. Starting with representatives from thirteen organizations across Africa, Australia, Europe, North, Central, and South America, preliminary plans for an international coordinating mechanism for biodiversity biobanks was developed. In 2013, an interim executive committee was established and an MOU (memorandum of understanding) was distributed to 17 potential collaborators for signature. Subsequently a governance and business model were developed based on input from across the collections and research communities. As the network grew, the interim executive committee solicited letters of intent to transition GGBN into a formal member-driven organization. In 2016 with 12 biodiversity collections online through GGBN’s data portal, the organization was launched and the business model implemented. This included a general and a technical secretariat, an executive committee and general assembly of its, at that time, 41 members. Having grown to encompass 87 general assembly members and 22 collections online in two years, GGBN is assessing its current business model, with focus on increasing revenue, and marketing strategy. Results of this assessment and associated next steps for GGBN are presented and discussed.

The variety of molecular methods used to analyze biosamples is continuously increasing, as is the need for the standardized deposition, documentation and citation of both the samples as well as the methods applied to them. Global initiatives such as the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC, http://www.insdc.org), Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD, http://www.boldsystems.org), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, http://www.gbif.org) and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN, http://www.ggbn.org), in addition to many others, have been working towards standardized access to biological data for many years. Collectively, these biodiversity data management platforms provide a considerable and indispensable infrastructure to the research community. However, cross-linking the massive amounts of protein and DNA sequence data submitted to these databases every year with standardized records of the underlying biological material remains challenging. Best practices for standardized data submissions and data citations are urgently needed.In the long run, two goals should be achieved above all else:all sequence data should be linked to natural history collections, andbiological material that was used for molecular research, especially DNA sequencing, should be deposited and, thus, made accessible in public, well curated collections.Here we will provide recommendations both for researchers and collections how to cite underlying biological material at INSDC and in publications in a standardized way towards Linked Open Data. We will also address how the global infrastructures and publishers can improve their interoperability.

Genomic science is revolutionizing and accelerating biodiversity research. For collections-based institutions to continue to lead and support biodiversity research, they must adapt to this new reality. Simultaneously, “big data” is accumulating so rapidly that we have unprecedented capacity to plan strategically to use genomics to advance basic and applied science on multiple fronts. For example, seven “big data” sources have the following numbers of records (2018 data): Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), ~1B; Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), ~3.6M;  National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), ~220M; Open Tree of Life (OToL), 1.9M;  Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD), ~6.3M; Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), ~99K;  Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN), ~2M. Collectively, they offer more than 1.2B records on biodiversity. At the scale of species (~2M described, multiple millions undescribed), these data are still too sparse to permit comprehensive conclusions. At the scale of families (i.e. deeper clades of life), the situation is far more promising: about 9,911 families are known, and relatively few are discovered each year. This suggests that at the family rank (and above), our knowledge of life on Earth is reasonably complete. Approximately 160,000 valid and accepted genera exist, but certainly many new genera await discovery and description. Genomics is the fastest way to group species into more inclusive lineages such as genera and families, and is certainly faster than traditional alpha taxonomy. Synergistically, these “big data” answer four important questions at deeper clade levels: What is it? Where is it? What do we know about it? What do we know about its genome? Approximately 4,500 eukaryotic genomes have been sequenced. The converse of what we know is what we do not know, another meaning of “dark taxa.” We can use the distribution and density of big data at deeper clade levels (families, genera) to quantitatively analyze “dark taxa” and therefore to strategically optimize knowledge and preservation of biodiversity at a global scale. Technicalities of the quantitative prioritization scheme are debatable, but some initial, simple scoring systems can help to prioritize lineages for collection and genetic research so as to most efficiently illuminate regions in the tree of life that that are neither preserved, imaged, geo-located, studied, nor known genomically. This analysis presents criteria and goals for collaborating to build a global genomic collection to maximize efficient acquisition of biodiversity genomic knowledge, and identifies the most valuable and highest priority taxa for genomic research.