The
Global Alliance for Genomics & Health Beacon Project enables safe
sharing of human genetic variants.
Galaxy lets you use the Beacon protocol to share genetic variants directly from your analysis with the
scientific community in the following anonymous way:
For participating users, we will merge variant lists to be shared into a single Beacon dataset per reference
genome and make that dataset accessible through a Beacon server.
If someone queries the server for a specific variant that is in our Beacon dataset, the server will reply
with
“Yes, we have seen such a variant”.
The user that issued the query then has the possibility to contact a Galaxy server admin who can link the
variant call in question to particular Galaxy users. If you are among the users that shared the variant, the
admin will, in turn, contact you and ask if you want to contact the user that initiated the query to
negotiate further information exchange or data access.
You can share data by copying VCF or VCF.bgzip files to a history called
{{ beaconHistoryName }}.
The Beacon database is rebuilt periodically. Therefore, changes do not go into effect immediately. If
you disable beacon sharing or remove a dataset from the beacon history, the corresponding variants will
disappear from the beacon dataset during the next rebuild.
Datasets must fulfill the following conditions in order to be processed