ALFRED: Ongoing Growth of an Anthropological Resource

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).ALFRED (the ALlele FREquency Database, http://alfred.med.yale.edu), created at Yale University in 2000 and supported since then by the NSF as scientific infrastructure, has been accumulating gene frequency data on human populations from diverse sources and currently has nearly 500,000 tables of allele frequencies involving over 18,000 polymorphisms with data on nearly 700 distinct populations from around the world. ALFRED has become a valuable international resource for research in human origins and expansion around the world; the data also have implications and value for biomedical research. This award will allow the already successful project to continue to enlarge the database contents by providing salary support to employ a staff of one full-time curator, a half-time programmer, and a part-time student. This staff will integrate into ALFRED new data becoming available, thus keeping the database active. Data from 'very high throughput' or VHT projects will greatly expand the contents of ALFRED through partially automating the curation process. Other data from the scientific literature will continue to be incorporated with priority given to results from populations not already represented in the database. The intellectual merit in this proposal consists of assembling into a single database in a standardized manner data that are published or publically available in diverse formats, often using non-standard terminology, and making those data accessible in user friendly, flexible ways. This process involves having a staff with a combination of expertise in anthropology, molecular biology, and computer science. ALFRED is already having a broad impact as a resource used internationally in research and teaching. Hundreds of different users access ALFRED every month and citations of ALFRED regularly occur in the literature. ALFRED is a unique resource that makes otherwise inaccessible data readily available to users from a variety of different fields.Continuing to improve the existing database by increasing its contents will only enhance its value in research and teaching. The proposed efforts to enhance the educational utility of the database will improve accessibility to large datasets for teaching/learning about normal human genetic variation and how that variation is distributed around the world, thereby illuminating our biological history as a species. It is also our belief that understanding normal genetic variation is one of the surest ways to prevent misuse of genetic data.