Preterm birth, or the delivery of an infant prior to 37 weeks of gestation, is a
significant cause of infant morbidity and mortality. In the last decade, the advent and
continued development of molecular profiling technologies has enabled researchers to
generate vast amount of ‘omics’ data, which together with integrative
computational approaches, can help refine the current knowledge about disease mechanisms,
diagnostics, and therapeutics. Here we describe the March of Dimes’ Database for
Preterm Birth Research (http://www.immport.org/resources/mod), a unique resource that contains a
variety of ‘omics’ datasets related to preterm birth. The database is open
publicly, and as of January 2018, links 13 molecular studies with data across tens of
thousands of patients from 6 measurement modalities. The data in the repository are highly
diverse and include genomic, transcriptomic, immunological, and microbiome data. Relevant
datasets are augmented with additional molecular characterizations of almost 25,000
biological samples from public databases. We believe our data-sharing efforts will lead to
enhanced research collaborations and coordination accelerating the overall pace of discovery
in preterm birth research.
Mammalian gestation and pregnancy are fast evolving processes that involve the interaction of the fetal, maternal and paternal genomes. Version 1.0 of the GEneSTATION database (http://genestation.org) integrates diverse types of omics data across mammals to advance understanding of the genetic basis of gestation and pregnancy-associated phenotypes and to accelerate the translation of discoveries from model organisms to humans. GEneSTATION is built using tools from the Generic Model Organism Database project, including the biology-aware database CHADO, new tools for rapid data integration, and algorithms that streamline synthesis and user access. GEneSTATION contains curated life history information on pregnancy and reproduction from 23 high-quality mammalian genomes. For every human gene, GEneSTATION contains diverse evolutionary (e.g. gene age, population genetic and molecular evolutionary statistics), organismal (e.g. tissue-specific gene and protein expression, differential gene expression, disease phenotype), and molecular data types (e.g. Gene Ontology Annotation, protein interactions), as well as links to many general (e.g. Entrez, PubMed) and pregnancy disease-specific (e.g. PTBgene, dbPTB) databases. By facilitating the synthesis of diverse functional and evolutionary data in pregnancy-associated tissues and phenotypes and enabling their quick, intuitive, accurate and customized meta-analysis, GEneSTATION provides a novel platform for comprehensive investigation of the function and evolution of mammalian pregnancy.
The original version of the Data Descriptor contained errors in the author list and affiliations. Rita Leite’s first name was misspelled as “Rite” and affiliations 4 and 5 were incorrectly swapped. In addition, members of the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center consortium were not listed in the agreed positions within the author list. These errors have now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions.
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