Multi-Omics DACC: The Data Analysis and Coordination Center for the collaborative multi-omics for health and disease initiative

ABSTRACT The NIH is establishing a new Multi-Omics for Health and Disease Consortium to advance the application of multi-omic technologies to study health and disease in ancestrally diverse populations. The Consortium comprises three components: Disease Study Sites (DSSs), ‘Omics Production Centers (OPCs), and a Data Analysis and Coordination Center (DACC). The project aims to establish a DACC to coordinate and support the Consortium’s activities and maximize its success. To be impactful, the Consortium’s experimental protocols must be transparent and reproducible, data must adhere to the FAIR guiding principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and computational methods and software tools must be open to the public. Furthermore, an interactive portal is needed for intuitive access to the data, and dedicated outreach efforts are required to assist the community in data use. We have assembled a unique team of investigators, data wranglers, software engineers, bioinformaticians, and postdocs to form a DACC to meet the challenges of ensuring high data quality and maximizing the consortium’s impact. All five DACC investigators have held leadership positions in large consortia in the past decade and bring substantial expertise in data coordination, management, harmonization, analysis, and integration. Our DACC will accomplish the goals of the Consortium via six specific aims: Aim 1. Coordinating and contributing to Consortium-wide protocol development, data analysis, and methods development. Aim 2. Managing and securing Consortium data by specifying metadata, establishing submission processes and standards, and incorporating experimental data and analysis results into AnVIL. Aim 3. Creating a multi-dimensional dataset that is available to the broader research community. Aim 4. Designing, developing, and maintaining an open-access portal for cataloging, querying, and visualizing summary-level data. Aim 5. Coordinating consortium logistics by organizing and facilitating internal and external activities, communications, and collaborations. Aim 6. Coordinating community outreach and dissemination of Consortium findings.