Project: The European Nutrition Phenotype Assassment and Data Sharing Initiative
| Acronym | ENPADASI (Reference Number: JTC-2016_019) |
| Duration | 18/12/2016 |
| Project Topic | ENPADASI is developing an open access research infrastructure (RI) for all nutritional mechanistic, interventional and epidemiological studies. For this development standardisation is crucial as combining studies depends on mapping those of similar data and design. The standardisation will consider study metadata and phenotypic data (e.g. clinical data, dietary intake, lifestyle and physical activity, metabolomics, and transcriptomics). For this purpose, existing data infrastructures will be connected and further developed. Finally, this will result in a system that is the most advanced system to integrate nutritional data in Europe/worldwide and to share small and big data in the nutritional field. The system will include options to perform integrated analysis on multiple studies to enable further exploitation of research data (hypothesis testing, scenario analysis and modelling), for reanalysis and to tackle research waste. Nutritional researchers across Europe will be trained to use the system, which will maximise the impact and encourage upload of all future nutritional studies and increase the quality of data collection and sharing protocols. Nutritional mechanistic, intervention and epidemiological studies make increasing use of high throughput technologies (e.g. metabolomics, high throughput screening) yielding large datasets. The strength of these technologies is to describe the whole system (systems biology), but previously it has been difficult for researchers to map these measurements to biological processes. Part of this problem is caused by the fact that the number of parameters measured out numbers the number of subjects greatly, weakening the power to arise biological conclusions. This power may be enlarged/increased by connecting the outcome of similar studies; however, this requires structured and standardized data storage and methods for integrated analysis. Making research data available/accessible after study finalization is often a prerequisite for funding, thus emphasising the need for a Research Infrastructure for deposition and future exploitation of the data. Data sharing implies not only collaboration and data exchange but also standardization of metadata and development of standardised protocols, to allow merging of datasets which can be queried as a single integrated dataset. |
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Project Results (after finalisation) |
In its first year ENPADASI made much progress: ENPADASI has so far developed three templates for data collection covering all types of study design, study content and study objectives. The project has collected 79 studies and has made 12 studies open access. Currently minimal requirements for nutritional data sharing and information on studies needed for study appraisal are being developed, these requirements will be added to the templates to make sure that all information relevant to judge the study quality are share, where possible. Moreover the ENPADASI partners are defining a biological question to be used as a case study to test the integration of studies within the ENPADASI infrastructure. A new more user-friendly version of the Phenotype database (www.dbnp.org) was developed and the upload of additional studies resulted in the identification of bugs and new features that have been fixed and/or implemented. Moreover, a technical definition of the database infrastructure that connects the intervention studies and observational studies is under discussion. In addition, based on the templates and uploaded studies nutritional terms were identified that were mapped to existing ontologies and new ontologies are being developed for nutritional terms. Moreover, partners in ENPADASI identified which items should be stored in the database if it is made clear under which conditions data can be used for data sharing or whether some actions are required (new inform consent, amendment, consortium agreement) or if data sharing is impossible. Sharing the benefit of the new discoveries coming from DASH-IN will require a clear consortium agreement in which the input of each partners is clearly stated. This part will be worked on with lawyers/legal representatives from different countries and institutions, as well as other groups working on similar problems such as the CORBEL project. Training is essential in all tools and services developed in the project as it is important for the long term impact of ENPADASI. In 2015, an international workshop on the study data sharing environment was held. At present a series of resources are being developed that will give guidelines and training in relation to ethics, privacy and IP with a focus on data sharing. The database interface workshop resulted in a list of questions that will be added to the FAQ. In addition, it was concluded that it was useful to have a blog alongside the study upload wizard. This will result in a living document of FAQs and will be part of the helpdesk. |
| Website | visit project website |
| Network | JPI HDHL |
| Call | ENPADASI |