37th INSDC meeting report: June 4-6 2024, Bethesda, USA

International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) hold the international meeting every year.
In 2024, the meeting was held 4-6 June at NCBI to discuss practical matters to maintain and update nucleotide sequence data archives.
The outcomes of the meeting are summarized below.

The Items Discussed and To Be Studied

Broaden INSDC membership

Founding Members of INSDC have enhanced the website, http://www.insdc.org/, to provide comprehensive information on how interested parties from around the world can participate in the INSDC.
The INSDC website now provides a formalized Founders Arrangement and a Membership Arrangement to broaden membership and attract qualified nucleotide sequence databases.

See INSDC introduces enhanced website aiming to broaden INSDC membership.

Regarding the requirement to state the location and date of sample collection

INSDC have discussed some practical matters for the requirement to state the location and date of sample collection since 2022.
Full-scale of the requirement is planned to start from December 2024.

TPA:experimental and TPA: inferential submission types will no longer be accepted as new submissions

For Third Party (TPA) data, due to the complexity of the submission process and changes to the technology used to analyze data, INSDC will no longer accept new submissions of type TPA: experimental and TPA: inferential after January 2025.
INSDC will continue to accept new TPA-assembly sequences.

Changes of the rules for describing features and qualifiers

The /country qualifier has been renamed to /geo_loc_name.
See The /country qualifier will be renamed to /geo_loc_name.
The following qualfiers will no longer be accepted with new submissions:
/clone_lib, /identified_by, /pop_variant, /sub_clone, /sub_strain, /tissue_lib
We are discussing to merge two qualifiers, /bio_material and /specimen_voucher.