Genome-wide association database developed in the Japanese Integrated Database Project

The establishment of high-throughput single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-typing technologies has enabled astonishing progress to be made in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and various novel genetic factors associated with complex diseases have been discovered. Our organization has created a public repository database (DB) to achieve a continuous and intensive management of GWAS data and to facilitate data sharing among researchers. In the GWAS DB, information on study design, quality control protocols, allele frequencies, genotype frequencies and statistical genetic analysis results are stored as publicly available data and can be accessed freely, whereas individual genotyping data and raw data are stored as restricted data and can only be accessed with authorization. All data are presented by a graphic viewer, which is designed to be user friendly for researchers who are not familiar with GWAS to accelerate disease-related studies. Furthermore, the DB allows users to compare various study results obtained by different institutions and on different platforms. The same data are also managed as a distributed annotation system to call up useful data from other DBs and to superimpose them on the GWAS data for help in interpretation. The DB is accessible at https://gwas.lifesciencedb.jp/. Journal of Human Genetics (2009) 54, 543-546; doi:10.1038/jhg.2009.68; published online 24 July 2009