The journal Science today published a special issue, featuring a series of papers from the PsychENCODE consortium.
The PsychENCODE consortium is a NIMH-funded set of grants across 15 institutions that focus on generating genomic and epigenetic data from postmortem brain tissue of individuals diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders, developing brains, and cellular model systems. Consortia members share data and insights with each other and the greater research community. Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research and technology development organization founded in Seattle in 2009, functions as the data coordination center for the consortium, using its Synapse platform to share and release data to qualified investigators in the research community.
Synapse tracks collaborative analysis across the PsychENCODE distributed teams, allowing each team to work on the same set of files and to broadcast their research findings in a transparent, reproducible manner. Synapse’s human data governance controls allow the distribution of sensitive human data directly to the broader research community. The PsychENCODE DCC at Sage Bionetworks is responsible for coordinating the upload of data to Synapse from each research project according to grant milestones, and for making the data available according to the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principle.
