MPEG-G ISO/IEC 23092

Genomic Information Representation

The MPEG-G standard is currently the largest coordinated and international effort addressing the problems and limitations of current technologies and products towards a truly efficient and economical handling of genomic information.

142. MPEG Meeting

The 142nd MPEG meeting will take place in Antalya (Turkey) from the 24th - 28th of April 2023. The purpose of this face-to-face meeting is to foster collaborations between members and across working groups in order to accelerate the standardization process....

139. MPEG Virtual Meeting

The 139th MPEG meeting was held online from July 18th to 22nd 2022. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject. During the Meeting MPEG published standard documents for MPEG-G...

137. MPEG Virtual Meeting

The 137th MPEG meeting was held digitally from January 17th to 21st 2022. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject. MPEG Genomic Coding evaluated Responses on New Advanced Genomics...

135. MPEG Virtual Meeting

The 135th MPEG meeting was held online from July 12th until 16th, 2021. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject. The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) addresses the...

The extensive usage of high-throughput deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing technologies opens up new perspectives in the treatment of several diseases and enables “precision medicine”. As DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of raw data, the ICT costs for the storage, transmission, and processing of DNA sequence data and related information, result to be very high due to the lack of universal standards preventing timely application of effective treatments.

The MPEG-G standard jointly developed by MPEG and ISO Technical Committee for biotechnology standards (ISO TC 276/WG 5) is the first international standard to address and solve the problem of efficient and cost-effective handling of genomic data by providing, not only new compression and transport technologies, but also a family of standard specifications associating relevant information in the form of metadata and a rich set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for building a full ecosystem of interoperable applications and services capable of efficiently processing sequencing data.

MPEG-G utilizes the latest technology to compress and transport sequencing data for complex use cases including:

Selective access to compressed data
Data streaming
Compressed file concatenation
Genomic studies aggregation
Enforcement of privacy rules
Selective encryption of sequencing data and metadata
Annotation and linkage of genomic segments
Interoperability with main existing technologies and legacy formats
Incremental update of sequencing data and metadata

source: mpeg.chiariglione.org

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The MPEG-G standard is composed by six parts:

Part 1: Transport and Storage

This part of the standard deals with data formats for both Transport and Storage of Genomic Information, with reference conversion process and informative annexes. The main topics covered by this part are genomic data streaming and file format.

Part 2: Compression

This part provides specifications for the normative representation of genomic sequence reads identifiers, genomic sequence reads (both unaligned reads and aligned reads), reference sequences and quality values. This is the part where compression is specified in terms of normative bitstream syntax and decoding behavior.

Part 3: Metadata and APIs

This part of the standard specifies information metadata, SAM interoperability, protection metadata and programming interfaces to access genomic information. The main goals are to enable (controlled) access to MPEG-G data from external applications and to add metadata to compressed genomic information.

Part 4: Reference Software

To support and guide potential implementers of MPEG-G, the standard includes a normative Reference Software. The Reference Software is normative in the sense that any conforming implementation of the decoder, taking the same conformant compressed bitstreams, using the same normative output data structures, will output the same data.

Part 5: Conformance

Conformance testing is fundamental in providing means to validate the correct implementation of the MPEG-G technology in different devices and applications and the interoperability among all systems. This part of the standard specifies a normative procedure to assess conformity to the standard on an exhaustive dataset of compressed data.

Part 6: Genomic Annotation

The output of most biological studies based on sequencing protocols is usually represented as different types of annotations (meta-information), all associated with one or more intervals on the reference genome. This part of the ISO/IEC 23092 standard series augments the MPEG-G hierarchy with the concept of meta-information related to intervals to support some additional use cases relevant to secondary data analysis.

MPEG-G Database

A test set of reference genomic data has been defined to perform tests during the process of standardization, definition of conformance test procedures and other experiments. More information on the MPEG-G database is available here.

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Next MPEG meeting

The next MPEG meeting will be held in person on 24^th – 28^th of April 2023 in Antalya (Turkey). More meeting information are available here.

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If you are interested in MPEG-G and the related activities you are welcome to join the open mailing list and contribute to the discussions

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