A Beacon is a web-accessible service that can be queried for information about a specific allele. A user of a Beacon can pose queries of the form Have you observed this nucleotide (e.g. C) at this genomic location (e.g. position 32,936,732 on chromosome 13)? to which the Beacon must respond with either yes or no.
The Beacon project is a project to test the willingness of international sites to share genetic data in the simplest of all technical contexts. For more information, visit GA4GH Data Working Group.
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