Marianna Bevova, Ruben van’t Slot, Flip Mulder, Cisca Wijmenga
Complex Genetics Group, DBG-Dept. Medical Genetics, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands
To establish a facility for large-scale association and linkage studies in complex traits we have installed an Illumina BeadStation 500GX in our laboratory. This facility has been in operation since 1 January 2005 and our group offers the equipment and technical assistance to research groups in the Netherlands on a collaborative basis. The facility is expected to process very diverse projects on many species. Ongoing projects include linkage studies, fine-mapping studies, and large-scale functional candidate gene studies.
The number of genotypes generated using the Illumina BeadStation is enormous and the storage and management of this data has therefore become an important aspect. We are developing a database and management system, named GIDS, which will provide a solution for the storage and management of the data. This includes, for example, the automatic generation of template files containing the plate-definitions to be used in the BeadStation and support for importing the resulting data. The limited manual labor involved, as well as the possibility of checking the data, also results in fewer data errors.
Our research group has a long-standing interest in complex disorders, including psychiatric disorders, celiac disease and intracranial aneurysms. A number of recently finished projects involve these disorders. An overview will be given of the facility and the ongoing and planned projects, as well as the strategy we follow. In addition, one of our projects will be discussed in