Forum:Current Useful Developments In The Field Integration Of -Omics Data

Question

[William]

What are currently developments to watch in the field of data-integration of Omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, phenomics ) data?

Some time ago RDF and triplestores were the main development in the field and I guess they still are. Big data sets like Kegg and Uniprot are now available as RDF (See http://linkeddata.org/) but I don't know how many people can and do integrate these data sources with their local produced data. . And you can't store your raw data in RDF, only your conlusions, leads , hypothesis etc.

In the Proteomics community a big development I guess is the increased reproducibilty of the datasets and standard data formats like mzML and mzIdent. But for the other Omics I don't know.

What does the community think are the developments are to watch for all us of people who are getting there hands on multi omics data and want to integrate all the stuff.

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

I've moved this question to the "forum", where it will have visibility for a longer time. I think that this question is a bit too generic, can you clarify it more?

[William]

It is a broad question. I am looking for the bigger general developments now and in the comming years that will improve our capabilty to ask multi-omics research question. From the practical standpoint that more and more consortia and labs have acces to multipe omics datasets and are having a hard time unlocking the combined information / knowledge contained wihtin these datasets.

Answer 1

[Larry_Parnell]

Such data integration is an ongoing endeavor of ours in the field of nutrigenomics, with applications in the genetic basis of the response to diet in humans and outcomes of obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. We often look to cancer genomics efforts as the driver of innovation in data integration. Although heart disease has been the top cause of death in the USA for a long time, cancer elicits more emotions and more efforts by pharmaceutical concerns to develop drugs against the various forms of cancer. We also have a better and deeper understanding of the causes of heart disease deaths, while cancer remains mysterious, but less so each day. These are some reasons, in my opinion, why cancer genomics is at the forefront of developing methods and tools to integrate multi-omics data.