Core C - Biostatistics and Modeling
Objective
Provide a centralized plan for management, analysis and integration of research data that will be utilized by several of our research projects and cores
Activities
- Statistics for experimental design, biomarker discovery and multivariate data analyses.
- Bioinformatics for reconstruction of regulatory pathways and cross-species extrapolations.
- Integrated data storage and management software that provides storage and tracking of raw experimental data along with important metadata (experimental conditions, sample characteristics, etc.).
Significance
The Research projects in this SRP are collecting large amounts of molecular and chemical data to determine new toxicity endpoints for PAH mixtures, mechanism of action for these endpoints, and assessment of PAH mixtures and particulates through environmental exposure. Integration of traditional toxicity endpoints with high-throughput gene expression data and high-dimensional analytical chemistry data is essential for the identification of biomarkers of response and chemical fingerprints of exposure. The integration of real environmental exposure data with traditional toxicity testing ensures that our estimates of risk are grounded in realistic exposures, and our PBPK component in Project 2 ensures that these exposure estimates are accurately translated to humans.
The Statistics and Bioinformatics Core greatly enhances our SRP by providing expert statistical and bioinformatics data analysis support and software solutions for data management and interpretation. The standardization of data analysis methods will ensure that the best methods are utilized and enhance the utility of such information in future risk assessments and regulatory decisions by regulatory agencies. The centralized data management organization also promotes data sharing across research projects and facilitates the publication of data to the NIEHS Chemical Effects in Biological Systems Knowledge Base for public availability of Program data. In addition, we are providing training to post-doctoral scientists and graduate students involved in the program who desire to learn the expert analysis methods needed for their projects.
Project-Generated Resources
The bioinformatics software updates will be released in the Bioinformatics Resource Manager (BRM) software as version 2.2. BRM is a client-server application, and account registration is required to store each user’s personal data securely on PNNL servers. BRM is publicly available on our website at http://sysbio.pnl.gov/brm/register.htm.
People
The team is multi-disciplinary with expertise in bioinformatics, statistics and computer science to provide an integrated group of services.
Katrina Waters, Leader, PNNL
Susan Tilton, PNNL
Fred Tilton, PNNL
Elena Peterson, PNNL
Melissa Matzke, PNNL
Cliff Pereira, Co-Investigator, OSU
The Bioinformatics Resource Manager provides seamless access to local and remote data sources for the purposes of dataset retrieval, merging and analysis.
