ENIGMA: crowdsourcing meets neuroscience.
ENIGMA: crowdsourcing meets neuroscience.
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DOI：
10.1016/s1474-4422(15)00005-8
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发表时间：
2015-05-01
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Mohammadi, Dara
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作者：
Mohammadi, Dara
我们的基因图谱如何影响我们的大脑？这些表型与复杂的神经和精神疾病有什么关系？美国南加州大学神经学教授保罗·汤普森（Paul Thompson）说，这些看似基本的问题的答案超出了大多数研究人员的能力范围，主要是因为在足够大的人群中进行成像和全基因组关联研究（GWAS）以梳理出对大脑的微妙遗传效应的费用。“假设你和我想对3万人进行成像基因组学研究，”他说。“我们会去美国的国立卫生研究院（NIH）或英国的惠康信托基金会，他们会嘲笑我们-他们会说这太贵了，光是扫描就需要3000万美元。2009年，汤普森和澳大利亚昆士兰州昆士兰州医学研究所的遗传流行病学教授尼克·马丁提出了一个解决方案，现在开始提供答案。他们共同创立了通过元分析增强神经成像和遗传学（ENIGMA）网络-以第二次世界大战期间Alan Turing及其同事使用的密码破译机命名。该网络汇集了对破解迄今为止神经和精神疾病中难以捉摸的基因型-表型关系感兴趣的研究人员。它拥有令人印象深刻的数字：它包括来自33个国家的185个机构的300名科学家，他们可以仔细研究来自30000名患者的现有基因组，成像和临床数据。
How do our genetic profiles affect our brains? And what relation do the resulting phenotypes have with complex neurological and psychiatric disorders? Answers to these seemingly fundamental questions, says Paul Thompson, professor of neurology at the University of Southern California, CA, USA, lie beyond the reach of most researchers, mainly because of the expense of doing imaging and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in a large enough population to tease out the often subtle genetic effects on the brain.“Say you and I wanted to do an imaging genomics study of 30 thousand people”, he says.“We’d go to the National Institutes of Health [NIH] in the States or the Wellcome Trust in the UK and they would laugh at us—they’d say it is too expensive and that it would cost $30 million in scans alone.” In 2009, Thompson and Nick Martin, professor of genetic epidemiology at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, QLD, Australia, came up with a solution that is now starting to provide answers. They co-founded the Enhancing Neuroimaging and Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Network—named after the code-breaking machine used by Alan Turing and colleagues during the Second World War. The network brings together researchers who are interested in cracking the thusfar elusive genotype–phenotype relations in neurological and psychiatric disorders. It boasts impressive numbers: it includes 300 scientists from 185 institutions in 33 countries who can pore through existing genomic, imaging, and clinical data from a combined 30 000 patients.