The Genome in a Bottle Consortium aims to develop reference materials, reference methods, and reference data to assess confidence in human whole genome sequencing variants. This will enable performance assessment of clinical sequencing. The consortium has released a pilot genome reference material (RM 8398) and is working to characterize additional genomes from diverse populations. Efforts include developing high-confidence calls for SNPs, indels, and structural variants; evaluating analysis methods; and establishing benchmarking tools to define performance metrics. The consortium seeks to support the use of reference materials for analytical validation and regulated clinical applications of genome sequencing.