Congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract are common birth defects. These defects are a significant public health problem affecting Americans and further, may go undetected but increase the risk of chronic diseases later in life. Since its inception, the GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project (GUDMAP) has provided a framework and repository for extensive expression data to provide a molecular anatomy of genitourinary development in the mouse with the long-term goal to harness and share our knowledge of urogenital development to forge innovative new approaches to treat disease. This work has advanced our understanding of subpopulations and patterning events in the developing nephron, lower urinary tract, and gonads. A deep understanding of the molecular drivers of kidney formation serves to inform current efforts in the field to create kidney organoids for therapeutic and disease studies. We propose to operate a GUDMAP Database that will facilitate a coordinated, focused, adaptive and interactive program of research by several groups, yielding results faster than a static collection of independent research projects. Coordination across the research consortium demands the ability to rapidly integrate new research projects, communicate results, and share knowledge and data across the consortium. Our work will generate connections between mouse and human data to link function to disease and thus identify potential causal and therapeutic targets. By providing tools to coalesce and link disparate datasets, we will provide efficient and easy methods to pose questions and further research. The GUDMAP Database will conduct meta- analysis to produce both informative ways to use the tools we build, and propose new testable hypotheses regarding urogenital development and disease. Our proposed GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project (GUDMAP) Database that will: 1) create organizational structure and processes that will enable seamless and frequent communication and collaboration between GUDMAP researchers, the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the broader research community; 2) create a highly usable database that will empower changing collections of researchers to rapidly upload, organize, and search heterogeneous data types; 3) build a comprehensive toolkit for data annotation, curation, analysis, visualization, and cross validation; 4) broaden the research community and create a framework for targeted shorter term research results by establishing an opportunity pool program; 5) disseminate consortium resources to the wider research community. In total, the impact of these elements of the GUDMAP will accelerate the rate of discovery within the consortium and the broader community.
Congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract are common birth defects. These defects are a significant public health problem affecting many Americans and further, may go undetected but increase the risk of chronic diseases later in life. Since its inception, the long-term goal of the GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project (GUDMAP) is to harness and share our knowledge of urogenital development to forge innovative new approaches to treat disease. Sharing data across the research community is essential to achieving this goal and to that end we propose a GUDMAP database project that will enable seamless and frequent communication and collaboration between GUDMAP researchers and the the broader research community working to address these significant problems.
