The Ark: Cloud-based bioinformatics tools

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  Project leader
  Prof John Hopper

  View researcher's webpage

Project Details

The objective of The Ark project is to provide a suite of secure, integrated web-based applications that incorporate the majority of the functionality required to conduct a complex study or clinical trial.

Project summary

As the volume and sensitivity of research data increases, due to technologies such as next generation sequencing of human specimens linked to clinical datasets, so too does the requirement for access to application software for integrating and interrogating the different types of research data.  Researchers often need to execute complicated queries and conduct analysis across multiple data types, such as phenotypic, genotypic, pedigree and biospecimen data.

The Ark project is a collaboration of the Centre for Genetic Origins of Health and Disease (GOHaD) at The University of Western Australia and the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at The University of Melbourne to develop an open-source platform to support Australian and International biomedical researchers.

The project has now delivered a web-based solution that delivers the following capabilities:

1. Create and a configure a study
2. Define users and manage their roles and access permissions
3. Define and manage a research participant pool
4. Define and manage the collection of phenotypic research data
5. Dynamically generate Electronic Data Capture (EDC) forms for collecting most types of textual research data
6. Manage biospecimens and the associated data (LIMS)
7. Model and visualise pedigree structures
8. Work tracking
9. Data extraction
10. Report generation

Researchers

Professor John Hopper

Dr Adrian Bickerstaffe

Thilina Ranaweera

Travis Endersby (University of Western Australia)

Chris Ellis (University of Western Australia)

Kelly Aujard

Funding

NeCTAR Project Grant