Asking an almost FAQ question here...
A colleague and I are writing a proposal with the goal of significantly increasing the annotation density for functional SNPs in human brain. A literature review of the area highlights several peculiar features of the psychiatric genetics field: research in the area is dramatically dominated by analyses of functional SNPs; there is a dearth of annotated brain-functional SNPs resulting in more than half of the publications in the area discussing the same 10 genes (and several of these aren't brain-functional); and finally, the few studies that go beyond these have done nothing to push their functional-SNP discoveries out to other researchers. resulting in new appealing targets going unrecognized and unexplored. We possess several unique resources including a significant brain brain bank, detailed psycho-behavioral metric data, and a unique statistical method for sequentially updating functional analyses as new data becomes available, without requiring re-analysis of previously acquired data. Using these, we propose to develop a much denser annotation of SNPs with demonstrated function in brain tissue, and to distribute this to the community. Further, we intend to develop a resource where future eQTL studies can be incorporated into the analysis thereby providing a mechanism for uniform dissemination of other researcher's results as well. We would like to know if you would be interested in carrying this annotation track as a standard feature in the UCSC Genome Browser. We firmly believe that the lack of such a uniform repository, and the relative lack of computational data-sharing accent in the currently extant projects, is one of the most significant impediments to the field of psychiatric genetics. We further believe that demonstrating a firm commitment to closing the loop and pushing our data back to the community, through a mechanism such as the UCSC browser, would be recognized as a significant feature of our proposal. Of course, we understand that numerous format, content, and logistic details would need to be worked out, but we have excellent programming staff and have no concerns regarding our ability to do the heavy lifting, if you would be interested in hosting the track once completed. Many thanks for your time and attention, Will Ray Chris Bartlett Nationwide Children's Hospital The Ohio State University Biophysics Program _______________________________________________ Genome maillist - [email protected] https://lists.soe.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/genome
