In its 30 years of activity ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 – also known as Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) – has developed many generations of successful standards that have transformed the world of media from analog to digital. Video, audio compression and transport technologies, as well as application formats and APIs, have provided the standard support enabling the interoperability and the integration we all witness in the digital media field.
ISO TC 276 has recently been established to work on the standardization of biotechnology processes including analytical methods (Working Group 3) and data processing and integration (Working Group 5).
MPEG, as developer of generic standard technologies is working with ISO TC 276/WG 5, integrators of biological data workflows, to produce a new open standard to compress, store, transmit and process sequencing data: MPEG-G. The standard will offer high levels of compression, approximately 100 times compared to raw data, i.e. more than one order of magnitude than possible with currently used formats. Furthermore, the MPEG-G standard will provide new functionalities such as native support for selective access, data protection mechanisms, flexible storage and streaming capabilities. This will enable various new applications scenarios, such as real-time streaming of data from a sequencing machine to remote analysis centers during the sequencing and alignment processes.
Interoperability and integration with existing genomic information processing pipelines is enabled by supporting conversion from/to the legacy FASTQ/SAM/BAM file formats.
