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Biobanks linked to electronic health records provide rich resources for health‐related research. With improvements in administrative and informatics infrastructure, the availability and utility of data from biobanks have dramatically increased. In this paper, we first aim to characterize the current landscape of available biobanks and to describe specific biobanks, including their place of origin, size, and data types. The development and accessibility of large‐scale biorepositories provide the opportunity to accelerate agnostic searches, expedite discoveries, and conduct hypothesis‐generating studies of disease‐treatment, disease‐exposure, and disease‐gene associations. Rather than designing and implementing a single study focused on a few targeted hypotheses, researchers can potentially use biobanks' existing resources to answer an expanded selection of exploratory questions as quickly as they can analyze them. However, there are many obvious and subtle challenges with the design and analysis of biobank‐based studies. Our second aim is to discuss statistical issues related to biobank research such as study design, sampling strategy, phenotype identification, and missing data. We focus our discussion on biobanks that are linked to electronic health records. Some of the analytic issues are illustrated using data from the Michigan Genomics Initiative and UK Biobank, two biobanks with two different recruitment mechanisms. We summarize the current body of literature for addressing these challenges and discuss some standing open problems. This work complements and extends recent reviews about biobank‐based research and serves as a resource catalog with analytical and practical guidance for statisticians, epidemiologists, and other medical researchers pursuing research using biobanks.
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Towards a unified data infrastructure to support European and global microbiome research: a call to action
Summary High‐quality microbiome research relies on the integrity, management and quality of supporting data. Currently biobanks and culture collections have different formats and approaches to data management. This necessitates a standard data format to underpin research, particularly in line with the FAIR data standards of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability. We address the importance of a unified, coordinated approach that ensures compatibility of data between that needed by biobanks and culture collections, but also to ensure linkage between bioinformatic databases and the wider research community.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1714276
- PAR ID:
- 10490401
- Publisher / Repository:
- society for applied microbiology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environmental Microbiology
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1462-2912
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 372 to 375
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.15323
