MICROGENNET · Extension, enhancement and strengthening of established collaborations for the purpose of a community-driven knowledge base for micronutrient genomics

Extension, enhancement and strengthening of established collaborations for the purpose of a community-driven knowledge base for micronutrient genomics

MICROGENNET has started in January 2012 as a collaboration between 16 distinguished universities and research institutes worldwide for a period of 4 years. The overall aim was to build, extend and strengthen sustainable collaborations between the partners to create a community driven knowledge base for micronutrient genomics research. The expertise and facilities of the partners are highly complementary and the synergy lies in the combination of expertise.This expertise made it possible to identify metabolic and functional target pathways of micronutrients relevant to health questions. These health questions are mainly centered around the micronutrients, selenium, zinc, carotenoids, folate and vitamins B, C and D. MICROGENNET finished in December 2015 and at http://www.microgennet.org in a MediaWiki suit, a complete overview of MICROGENNET is given. This wiki is used to communicate between the partners. It is part of a larger wiki at http://www.micronutrientgenomics.org which serves as a means to communicate with the micronutrient community as a whole. The latter wiki will give access to the MICROGENNET project sub wiki after the end of the project. All partners can view and add content to the wiki creating an interactive and open environment. Importantly, the MICROGENNET partners created a collection of micronutrient-relevant pathways.These pathways are shared with the whole research community via a popular and commonly used online pathway curation platform, WikiPathways. A micronutrient-dedicated portal in WikiPathways is available with a broad collection of micronutrient-relevant pathways, see http://micronutrients.wikipathways.org. In total 23 researchers went on a MICROGENNET exchange and these exchanges had a total duration of 40 months, resulting in (i) thirteen published research papers, (ii) several conference abstracts, (iii) new research proposals and (iv) training of (junior) researchers to learn methods and tools important for micronutrient genomics research. The pathways developed and the pathway and network biology approaches used and taught to researchers involved allows evaluation of micronutrient research data in the context of the understanding that we have about biological processes. That will help increase the actual understanding obtained from such studies as is shown in the published papers. This increased understanding is expected to lead to research interpretations that are more useful for policy making with respect to adviced intakes. Contact address Prof. dr. Chris Evelo Department of Bioinformatics-BiGCaT, Maastricht University PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands chris.evelo@maastrichtuniversity.nl

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