Synergy Core (SynC)

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Synergy Core (SynC) will support the overall mission of the Integrative Omics Center for Accelerating Neurobiological Understanding of Opioid Addiction (ICAN) to discover and share biological drivers of opioid addiction (OA) by coordinating a unified and rigorous approach to analyses across ICAN, providing highly advanced computing infrastructure for ICAN analyses, combining external OA data with ICAN data, and creating a unique national resource that shares data and results from ICAN analyses with the research community via a user friendly web-based data portal, mapOA. Each ICAN Project will provide important stand- alone discoveries but combining and integrating across Projects will enhance statistical power through meta- analyses, illuminate the potential function of statistical associations (for example, mapping significant loci to functional gene targets), provide a biologically integrated interpretation through the harmonization of human studies and animal model studies, and ultimately generate and test hypotheses about putative mechanisms. For ICAN and the field to leap forward in understanding the individual biological variation that leads to OA, omics integration is key. The SynC will provide cross-project and research community integration that facilitates scientific synergy by accomplishing the following Specific Aims: (1) align ICAN analyses with milestones set by the Center Steering Committee and coordinate development of analytic techniques, standards, procedures, and documentation; (2) establish and maintain a centralized high-performance computing environment and standardized pipelines for data ingestion and omics analyses; (3) ingest and standardize external OA datasets and conduct integrative analyses across ICAN and external data; and (4) develop a user-friendly web-based resource, mapOA, for sharing of integrated OA omics and imaging data within ICAN and with the broader research community. Achieving the SynC aims will dramatically increase synergistic integration of ICAN Projects by providing investigators and the research community with mapOA for easy access to robustly QC’ed and harmonized results from all projects and ingested publicly available data; providing a standardized HPC environment and pipelines; and conducting integrative analyses beyond those in individual Projects. The SynC is key to making ICAN more than the sum of its individual Projects. The SynC team is co-led by Multiple Principal Investigators Eric Otto Johnson, PhD, and Nathan Gaddis, PhD, who bring expertise in multisite consortia coordination; addiction research; epidemiology; high performance cloud computing infrastructure; pipeline and workflow development; data structuring, integration, and processing; omics data analysis in diverse populations; and data visualization. They are supported by a broad team of statisticians, bioinformaticists, and developers. Together, they will ensure that SynC maximizes the impact of ICAN research into the biological drivers of OA.