Creating a West African BioResource for Nutritional Genetics and Epigenetics

在MRC单位的营养主题冈比亚将与布里斯托（布里斯托大学和MRC综合流行病学单位）的一个广泛的合作者团队合作，创建一个新的西非生物资源（WABR）。新的生物资源将包括丰富的营养队列，数据库和Keneba生物库，该生物库是在冈比亚农村的西江地区经过几十年的研究建立的。这些将开放给世界各地的合作者，以支持新的研究方法，以更好地了解饮食，营养状况和传染性和非传染性疾病之间的复杂关系。新方法将强烈基于基因在行动（或称为召回基因型）范式，使研究人员能够研究遗传和表观遗传变异对健康的影响，使用少量参与者进行高效研究。基于布里斯托集团的世界领先的工艺，我们将进行“克隆和适应”演习，使冈比亚的生物资源达到相同的世界标准。这一进程将扩大到MRCG Fajara和我们在达喀尔的西非全球卫生联盟伙伴机构IRESSEF的生物库。我们还将准备一个生物资源工具包，可供其他中低收入国家的其他研究所和生物库使用。

The Nutrition Theme at MRC Unit The Gambia will partner with a broad team of collaborators in Bristol (Bristol University and MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit) to create a new West African BioResource (WABR). The new bioresource will consist of rich nutritional cohorts, databases and the Keneba Biobank constructed over decades of research in the West Kiang area of rural Gambia. These will be made open access to worldwide collaborators to support novel research methods to better understand the complex relationships between diet, nutritional status and infectious and non-communicable diseases. The new methodologies will be strongly based on a genes-in-action (alternatively known as recall-by-genotype) paradigm that allows investigators to research the impact of genetic and epigenetic variants on health with highly efficient studies using small numbers of participants. Based upon the Bristol group's world-leading processes we will conduct a 'clone and adapt' exercise to bring the Gambian bioresource up to the same world standard. This process will be extended to the biobanks at MRCG Fajara and at our West African Global Health Alliance (WAGHA) partner institute IRESSEF in Dakar. We will also prepare a bioresource toolkit that can be accessed by other institutes with cohorts and biobanks in other LMICs.