Baylor Johns Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genetics

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The biomedical value of identifying the genes and variants responsible for Mendelian disorders is extraordinarily high. The clinical manifestations of these disorders involve developmental and physiological parameters of virtually all organ systems. About a third of recognized Mendelian disorders (as enumerated in the OMIM database) remain unexplained at the molecular level and many more of these disorders remain to be recognized, described and explained. Over the last eight years, the Baylor College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine human genetics programs have combined and formed the Baylor-Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics (BHCMG) to address this problem. In doing so, we have taken advantage of the synergies afforded by combining our expertise in clinical genetics, genomic technologies, genetic analysis and understanding the biological basis of genetic disease. We have met and will continue to meet the challenge of finding and recruiting for our research patients with unexplained Mendelian disorders and by utilizing our worldwide network of colleagues and former trainees. Using state of the art genomic methods and analytic tools, we have already sequenced the exome or the genome of 10,827 individuals, identifying 358 novel disease genes, and have another > 5,000 samples ready to sequence from collaborators in the USA and 40 other countries. This effort has resulted in 273 peer- reviewed papers from BHCMG. In the future, we will expand this network of collaborators to identify more samples. To assist in consenting samples from around the world, we have designed an online consenting process approved by our IRB that bypasses the bottlenecks of time difference and language in international and remote site recruiting. To streamline and monitor our progress we continue to enhance PhenoDB, a web-based tool for the collection, storage and analysis of phenotypic features and genotype information. PhenoDB also tracks samples, and is updated with the deliberations of our expert committees for Phenotype Review and ELSI issues. PhenoDB is fully searchable and incorporates OMIM for disease classification and genes, as well as many other resources to enable analysis. We have and will continue to build on our existing high throughput sequencing pipelines and have developed integrated laboratory and analysis efforts with experts from both institutions to develop new methods and software to advance the field. To promote data sharing, we are aggregating exome sequencing data and phenotypic data produced at BCM and at JH in a data lake suitable for joint analysis. We have and will disseminate the phenotype and molecular information through publication, lectures, posting to communal websites and dbGaP. Our GeneMatcher online tool now has > 11,000 genes submitted by >7,000 investigators and cited in > 150 publications and is part of the MatchMaker Exchange initiative involving geneticists around the world. We have also recently added a VariantMatcher functionality to PhenoDB that is accessible to all investigators.