About BioSamples

The BioSamples Service

BioSamples is a sample metadata repository for the deposition and exploration of samples used in various projects across different domains. BioSamples is used by large consortia to structure and manage their samples, as well as small individual labs to submit their metadata. The resource provides unique accessions for publications, and functions as a central hub for managing and viewing sample metadata, utilising community standards from the GSC (Genomic Standards Consortium) and beyond.

If you submit information to BioSamples please note that we will handle your submission in accordance with our Submission Privacy Notice.

BioSamples is freely available, and its content is distributed under the EMBL-EBI Terms of Use. The BioSamples code is available in GitHub and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Contacts

If you still need support after reading our help pages, please email us at biosamples@ebi.ac.uk.

We welcome enquiries on data submission and data access, as well as more technical issues, e.g. integration with other databases, linked open data, etc. Feedback on data content as well as new features requests are also welcome.

If you use BioSamples Database regularly, or maintain software that interacts with it, you may want to keep up to date with any changes and extensions to the functionalities by subscribing to the biosamples-announce mailing list. This is a very low volume list which includes mostly information about new releases and downtimes.