Overture paper

Mélanie Courtot Director Genome Informatics & Principal Investigator

April 24, 2025 May 16, 2025

🚀 Excited to announce the publication of our latest paper in GigaScience: “Overture: an open-source genomics data platform.” In this work, we present Overture, a scalable, open-source platform developed by the Genome Informatics team at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) to manage and analyze large-scale genomics data.

🧬 Designed to streamline data workflows and enhance reproducibility, Overture supports collaborative research across the genomics community. Overture is already powering major international efforts like ICGC-ARGO and GA4GH Driver Projects, enabling secure, federated, and FAIR data sharing at scale.

❤️ Huge thanks to the amazing team and collaborators across the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, ICGC ARGO, and many others who made this work possible!

🔗 Read the paper here.

🛠️ Overture is avwailable from the Overture.bio website.

Data retrieval workflow: users first filter data via Arranger’s search components in the Stage UI’s data explorer. Once they have selected a subset, they then download a “file manifest” from the download dropdown. To access Song and Score data, users log in through Stage’s auth integration and obtain their API key from the profile page. This API key is provided when installing the score client. Finally, files are downloaded to the user’s device using the Score client’s download command, specifying the file manifest and desired output directory.