Beacon Landing Page

The Beacon project started by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) in 2014, initially to test the willingness of international data owners to make available the smallest amount of information. A Beacon allows an anonymous query as to whether the dataset contains a genome with a given base at a particular coordinate, with a simple yes/no response. The Beacon Project had processed more than 1.5 million queries against at least 100,000 genomes held by more than 25 different organisations.

For more information see the Beacon Project Website The Beacon API v1.0 is an approved standard of GA4GH, described in a webinar

Beacon v2 proposal opens the way for the design of simple but powerful "genomics API". 

Example query: Have you seen deletions in this region of Chr.9 in Glioblastomas from a juveline patient, in a dataset with unrestricted access? 

Publications & Press releases

Federated discovery and sharing of genomic data using Beacons (Nature, Mar 2019) 

GA4GH and ELIXIR Release V1.0.0 of Beacon API with increased security measures (Oct 2018)

ELIXIR and GA4GH Beacon Team Up to Advance Genomic Data Sharing (Jan 2017)