Creating a West African BioResource for Nutritional Genetics and Epigenetics

冈比亚将与布里斯托尔（布里斯托尔大学和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群体、数据库和Keneba生物银行，这些生物银行是在冈比亚农村的西江地区经过几十年的研究而建立起来的。这些数据将向全球合作者开放，以支持新的研究方法，更好地了解饮食、营养状况与传染性和非传染性疾病之间的复杂关系。新的方法将强有力地建立在作用基因（或称为按基因型回忆）范式的基础上，该范式允许研究人员利用少量参与者进行高效研究，研究遗传和表观遗传变异对健康的影响。基于布里斯托尔小组世界领先的过程，我们将进行一项“克隆和适应”的工作，使冈比亚生物资源达到同样的世界标准。这一进程将扩展到法哈拉医学中心和我们在达喀尔的西非全球卫生联盟（WAGHA）伙伴研究所IRESSEF的生物库。我们还将准备一个生物资源工具包，供其他在其他中低收入国家拥有队列和生物库的其他研究所使用。

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.