Project Summary/Abstract
The goals of the IGVF Data Administrative and Coordinating Center (DACC) are to support the IGVF
Consortium by defining and establishing a strategy that connects all participants to the project’s science.
By creating avenues of access that distribute these data to the greater biological research community,
the DACC provides a critical connection between scientific producers and consumers. The IGVF
Consortium brings together laboratories that generate complex data types via novel experimental
assays, often focusing at the single-cell level of gene expression. This work is extended and regularized
by laboratories that integrate these unique data using computational analyses to discover the
associations and networks between human variation, chromosomal elements and molecular phenotypes
for the purpose of elucidating their complex relationship in human cells and tissues. The DACC’s
participation enhances the data created by the consortium through the creation of structured procedures
for the verification and validation of all submitted data and providing processes for the documentation of
metadata that describe each biological sample and assay method. To facilitate access to all the data
created, the DACC will construct a state of the art data warehouse, design and develop robust software
to enable data submission, and harden unified data processing pipelines. All experimental and
computational results will be made available via the IGVF Portal, developed by the DACC. The Portal
will integrate these data resources and provide enhanced search and browsing capabilities, along with
powerful web services. The DACC will develop tools for semantically-enhanced graph-based searches
of experiment metadata, individual genomic elements, variation and phenotype, and will implement
methods to distribute these results in matrices suitable for machine learning. Beyond computational
infrastructure to house and distribute consortium data, the DACC will also function as the administrative
hub of the IGVF. Consortium science thrives on clear and forthright communication between its
component parts, and it is the DACC’s responsibility to manage this relationship. This effort will be
facilitated by management of consortium working groups, organization of scientific results and
publications, and providing regular reporting and feedback to the Steering committee. To fully support
the community, the DACC will act as a service organization, allowing biomedical research to take full
advantage of the results from the IGVF. To this end, the DACC will organize and host consortium-
focused and user-focused meetings, and will provide documentation via many media including written
documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and meeting presentations. The various component projects of
the IGVF (DACC, mapping, systematic characterization, genetic network regulation, modeling of
genomic variation centers and groups) will be tightly woven together to create the IGVF Consortium.
