ALFRED: Ongoing Growth of an Anthropological Resource

ALFRED（ALlele FREquency Database，http://alfred.med.yale.edu）于2000年在耶鲁大学创建，并从那时起由NSF作为科学基础设施提供支持，一直在积累来自不同来源的人类群体的基因频率数据，目前拥有近500，000张等位基因频率表，涉及超过18，000种多态性，其中包括来自世界各地近700个不同人群的数据。ALFRED已成为研究人类起源和在世界各地扩展的宝贵国际资源;这些数据对生物医学研究也有影响和价值。 该奖项将允许已经成功的项目继续扩大数据库内容，提供工资支持，雇用一名全职馆长，一名兼职程序员和一名兼职学生。这名工作人员将把现有的新数据纳入ALFRED，从而保持数据库的活动。 来自“非常高吞吐量”或VHT项目的数据将通过部分自动化管理过程大大扩展ALFRED的内容。 将继续纳入科学文献中的其他数据，并优先考虑数据库中尚未出现的人群的结果。 这一建议的知识价值在于以标准化方式将以各种格式公布或通过电子方式提供的数据汇集到一个单一的数据库中，这些数据往往使用非标准术语，并以方便用户的灵活方式提供这些数据。这一过程涉及到拥有一个在人类学，分子生物学和计算机科学的专业知识相结合的工作人员。 ALFRED作为国际研究和教学中使用的资源已经产生了广泛的影响。 每个月都有数百名不同的用户访问ALFRED，并且ALFRED的引用经常出现在文献中。 ALFRED是一个独特的资源，使无法访问的数据随时提供给用户从各种不同的领域。继续改善现有的数据库，增加其内容只会增加其在研究和教学中的价值。 拟议的努力，以提高数据库的教育效用将改善访问大型数据集的教学/学习有关正常的人类遗传变异和变异是如何分布在世界各地，从而照亮我们作为一个物种的生物历史。 我们也相信，了解正常的遗传变异是防止滥用遗传数据的最可靠方法之一。

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.