This worksheet serves as a quick guide for submitting sample metadata for IGSN registration. It contains an overview of the describable data categories, column descriptions and instructions for the ‘Guide’ worksheet and illustrations to explain how samples can be organised hierarchically.

In this worksheet you select the variables that are required for the description of your samples. Samples can be organised in so-called ‘parent-child’ relationships. Select variables that are relevant for the description of your samples in each hierarchy level by inserting crosses (x) to the columns A-D (SELECT). The sample description templates for the four subsequent worksheets (Parent to Child3) are automatically generated from the selected variables.

These worksheets serve as sample description tables that can be used in particular for the bulk registration of samples, but also for single samples. Minimum requirements for the IGSN registration of samples are preselected and can be extended by optional variables in the ‘Guide’ worksheet. Fill these worksheets to describe your samples.

These mandatory variables are preselected and can be filled in with standardised values from controlled vocabularies. For the description of these variables, we recommend using the values (copy-paste) from the worksheets given in the template in order to ensure the uniformity of the catalogued data. Please let us know if the terms you need to describe the samples are not available.

These optional variables can also be filled with standardised values from controlled vocabularies. Here we also recommend using the values from the controlled vocabularies provided in the FAIR SAMPLES template.