Program requests Council approval for an initiative to provide funding to support informatics resources for the biomedical community.
The efficient conduct of modern biomedical research heavily depends on data that should be readily available through a variety of databases and knowledge portals. Examples include model organism data bases such as Echinobase and gene expression databases such as the Gene Expression Database. There is an ongoing need to support informatics resources which are essential information sources for experimental design and serve as information hubs for collating, curating and making available research study results to the biomedical research community. These bioinformatics resources are particularly important to the birth defects and developmental biology communities as they provide essential resources for designing and interpreting functional validation studies for genomic variants identified by next generation sequencing of human patient populations.
The goal of this initiative is to provide support for the continued availability, operation, improvement, and dissemination of databases, digital information, or software tools that are of special importance and demonstrable value toward serving the needs of the NIH biomedical research community.
This proposed concept aligns with the NICHD cross cutting vision area of advancing Transdisciplinary science since these resources are essential to supporting the creation of standardized ontologies and nomenclatures, harmonizing data systems, increasing access to shared databases that also provide innovative analytic tools.
The concept also aligns with the DBSV branch research priority of supporting research using model organisms and providing research tools and resources to facilitate research into embryogenesis and toward understanding the etiology of structural birth defects.
Program Contact
James Coulombe
Developmental Biology and Structural Variation Branch (DBSVB)
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