Washington University Omics Production Center - Project Summary To improve our understanding of human disease in ancestrally diverse populations, we propose to establish the Washington University Omics Production Center (WU-omics PC). As part of the Multi-Omics of Health and Disease Consortium, the WU-omics PC will help design a collaborative plan to: (i) explore the use of multi- omics, environmental exposure data, and phenotypic information to assess disease states; (ii) develop methods for data harmonization, integration, and interpretation in multi-omics studies; and (iii) create a rich set of robust multi-dimensional data to share with the research community. In the first year of the award, the WU- omics PC will work closely with other members of the Consortium to design a project roadmap that details strategies for subject recruitment, the types of biospecimens to be collected, sample handling and shipping procedures, omics techniques to be performed, and best practices for transferring and integrating harmonized data. After year 1, we propose for the WU-omics PC to collect whole genome sequencing, whole genome bisulfite sequencing, ATAC-seq, RNA-seq, proteomics, and metabolomics data by using the agreed upon methods. The WU-omics PC will collect omics data by using well-established workflows that the same investigative team has already successfully applied to other multi-omics studies of similar scope and scale. Our omics workflows have been extensively benchmarked and we have detailed protocols for quality assurance, quality control, and correction of batch effects. The WU-omics PC is uniquely positioned to accomplish its goals because the infrastructure to perform large-scale, high-throughput omics assays is already in place. Moreover, the leadership of the WU-omics PC has a successful track record of participating in omics consortia and provides complementary and synergistic research expertise in genetics, biochemistry, analytical instrumentation, computational data processing, and multi-dimensional data integration.
