The goals of the Data Analysis Core (DAC) are to provide cutting-edge analytical techniques to Core investigators, to supply centralized data management methods to meld new experimental data with existing and evolving genetic and clinical information, to promote and facilitate the research undertaken by the Center Investigators in the Oklahoma Rheumatic Disease Research Core Center (ORDRCC), and to provide educational and technical support for the development of analytical capabilities at all levels of the ORDCC, spanning from established investigators to junior investigators and including post-doctoral candidates, students and select technical personnel. As potential collaborators for all research projects and key mandatory resources for all funded feasibility projects, the DAC will be an integral part of the research team in study development and methodology selection, as well as providing ongoing statistical and analytical advice for each individual project. Centralized analysis through the DAC will enable the development of standard operating procedures for data handling such as the standardization of statistical diagnostic checks of distributional assumptions, outliers (overly influential data points), to name a few. This will ensure that all analyses are of the same high quality and rigor. The DAC provides more efficient management of the data shared between projects, better quality control of both data and analysis, improved transfer of data between Cores and projects, and standardization of data and analysis presentation. The specific functions of the DAC will include providing state of the art analysis capabilities for data from SNP arrays, gene expression, genetic linkage, genetic association studies and longitudinal data collections;providing experimental design advice and training to Center Investigators (and to OMRF);assisting, advising, and implementing high quality data management within laboratories;developing key new analytic methods for evolving data;and providing high level informatics and programming capabilities to Junior Investigators. Services offered by the DAC: consultation on experimental design including power analysis;genetics data analysis including linkage and association approaches, which further subdivide to include fine mapping methods, family-based association and haplotype-based methods, case-control candidate gene methods and multi-locus methods;gene expression analysis from microarray experiments including normalization of microarray data, analysis of differentially expressed genes, analysis of alterations in gene functional association using various clustering methods, identifying genes associated with biochemical pathways of interest and creation of transcription based gene networks, selection of genes with discriminatory capabilities for disease in genetic data analysis and basic statistical analysis. High quality data analysis provided by the DAC is essential for meaningful interpretation of results from proposed projects and for the planned collaborative interdisciplinary research.
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