This Core has played an essential role in the research program over its 15 year history. The Bioinformatics and Data Management Core will continue to serve the overall research program and each of the four component projects. It will continue to build an archive of all data generated under this mechanism of support. In addition, the archive will begin to compile selected neurobiological datasets on behaviorally characterized young and aged Rhesus monkeys, along with records of all behavioral data on those subjects. This archive serves all members of the investigative group and constitutes a highly valuable base of information in the area of neurocognitive aging. We are currently enhancing the accessibility of all datasets and research findings both within the research program and for outside investigators by establishing a secure server as a centralized repository for all project activities, results and analyses, and publications with web-based software on the front-end to facilitate access to the database on the back-end. Specific personnel in Core C are tasked with the database resource development and data management. The Core will further provide expertise in statistics and bioinformatics to all projects under their respective research plans. This function of the Core is critical in the design and analysis of experiments that provide increasingly complex data and require analytical methods beyond the expertise of Project Leaders. In particular, our planned investigations include several microarray experiments, which generate extensive datasets requiring specialized analytic tools to reach reliable conclusions. Further, placing the bioinformatics and the database archive under a single management entity, will facilitate integration of the substantial information garnered through microarray analysis with the more focused research of individual projects. Specific activities in bioinformatics will include rigorous quality assessment of microarray data generated through individual projects via the JHU microarray core facility (Affymetrix core). All analyses involving the identification of lists of genes, or the implementation of a battery of tests on a genome-wide scale, will be accompanied by assessments of uncertainty in the form of false discovery rates to allow fine control over the number of falsely identified genes. Both a priori hypothesis-driven analyses (based on prior work in the projects) and discovery approaches will be taken to fully exploit the value of information in the microarray datasets. In addition, beyond the project components producing microarrays, the base of information in those datasets will be of interest to all investigators. We position microarray datasets along with bioinformatics expertise within this Core to allow all participating investigators the opportunity to examine findings within the framework of their own research focus.
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