ERGA meets VGP in New York City

Last week, ERGA was present at the Vertebrate Genomes Project 2025 Conference, held at The Rockefeller University in New York City from September 30 and October 1. ERGA and VGP share a long-standing collaboration, working together on shared workflows for genome assembly and evaluation and collaborating under the Biodiversity Genomics Project (BGE). So far, dozens of vertebrate genomes from species found across Europe have been sequenced under the ERGA umbrella, directly contributing to the VGP’s goal of sequencing all ~70,000 living vertebrate species.

Discussing vertebrate genomes in the heart of New York City.

Tom Brown, coordinator of the ERGA IT & Infrastructure Committee, presented the work within the BGE project on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) genome assembly publishing and establishing distributed models of genome generation across Europe. As the VGP and the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) begin their journey into the Phase II expansions of each project, attention must be given to fully FAIR reporting and publishing of all outputs from sample to reference genome, and coordinated across all nodes of the EBP. 

In New York, Tom presented ERGA’s solutions for  generating reports for all genomes produced as part of the BGE project and sharing all bioinformatic workflows within WorkflowHub.

Photos by Chul Lee.

Relevant links

• VGP Website: https://vertebrategenomesproject.org/

• Larivière, D., Abueg, L., Brajuka, N. et al. Scalable, accessible and reproducible reference genome assembly and evaluation in Galaxy. Nat Biotechnol 42, 367–370 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-02100-3