Maintenance and Extension of a Central Project Knowledge Base (CPKB), systems biomedicine and statistics pipeline

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Hauke Busch; Professorin Dr. Jeanette Erdmann (†); Professorin Dr. Inke Regina Koenig; Professor Dr. Michael Krawczak
• Subject Area: Molecular and Cellular Neurology and Neuropathology
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 287074911

The goals of the INF project in the second funding period of ProtectMove are three-fold. The first is to maintain and develop a Central Project Knowledge Base (CPKB) that supports team communication, provides a regulatory framework for data management and enables its long-term storage. The second is to operate a Systems Biomedicine Core which provides bioinformatics and modeling support for all projects. Activities will be pursued by groups at the two UKSH campuses at Lübeck and Kiel and the Bioinformatics Core at the University of Luxembourg. The third goal is to provide Biostatistics support for high-level statistical expertise with respect to study design and analysis. The CPKB will continue to be responsible for the long-term management, storage and governance of all data generated by ProtectMove subprojects. It will facilitate internal communication within the research group by developing further a group-wide research Wiki. A focus will be to align IT activities for ProtectMove with current data integration at UKSH in Lübeck/Kiel. The Biostatistics pipeline will provide state-of-the-art biometric support including study design, genetic epidemiological, classical statistical, and machine learning approaches. These will optimize experimental and human studies and strengthen the integrity and reproducibility of results. The Systems Medicine Core will provide comprehensive analyses of genome, transcriptome, epigenome, metabolome and phenome data. Data analysis will be pursued to variable depth according to the needs and wants of the project partners, ranging from experimental design, quality control, normalization and data annotation to integrative OMICs analysis using unsupervised or supervised methods and detailed modeling of molecular pathways. Data will be processed using standardized, yet adaptive workflows that will run reproducibly as singularity containers in a high-performance computing environment on the Lübeck campus.All PIs have extensive experience in leading and coordinating informatics support projects in medical research networks. The Krawczak group has been involved in implementing and operating the P2N biobank network at Kiel University and is participating in the integration of patient- centered research and clinical care data. The Erdmann group has world-leading expertise in complex genetics with a main focus on cardio-genetics. The König group has long-standing expertise in large scale genetic epidemiological studies, clinical trials, prognostic modeling, and development of machine learning methods. The Busch group heads a systems biology core unit at Lübeck University, develops the HPC infrastructure on campus and is experienced in bioinformatics analysis of various data types. The May group has established a data-hub for Parkinson’s disease (PD) sequencing data, is involved in international multi-omics projects on epilepsy, microbiome and PD research and hosts the ELIXIR node for Translational Medicine.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2488: Reduced penetrance in hereditary movement disorders: Elucidating mechanisms of endogenous disease protection
• International Connection: Luxembourg
• Partner Organisation: Fonds National de la Recherche
• Cooperation Partner: Patrick May, Ph.D.