Project Summary The goals of the ENCODE Data Coordinating Center (DCC) is to support the ENCODE Consortium by defining and establishing a strategy that connects all participants to the data and by creating avenues of access that distribute these data to the greater biological research community. The ENCODE Consortium brings together laboratories that generate complex data types via experimental assays with laboratories that integrate these unique data using computational analyses to discover how chromosomal elements function together to define human cells and tissues. The DCC's participation enhances the data created by these laboratories through the creation of structured procedures for the verification and validation of all submitted data and providing processes for the documentation of metadata that describe each biological sample and assay method. To facilitate access to all the data created the DCC will construct a state of the art data warehouse. The DCC will design and development robust software to enhance the data submission and unified data processing pipelines, the organization and access to metadata and the data warehouse. In addition, we will develop and maintain the ENCODE Portal that will be the primary entry point to the wealth of experimentally determined information as well as results of computational analyses. The Portal will integrate these data resources and make them available via enhanced search and browsing capabilities. Tools will be implemented to aid discovery by both experienced bioinformaticians and naïve laboratory staff. The DCC will evolve into a substantial service organization allowing biomedical research to take full advance of the ENCODE results. To this end the DCC will provide documentation via many media including written documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and meeting presentations. The DCC, DAC, production laboratories and AWG will be tightly woven together to create the ENCODE Consortium.

Relevance to Public Health, Project Narrative The ENCODE Consortium defines standards for reproducibility, quality control, validation metrics, metadata models and gold standards datasets for genomic scale assays of the chromosomal functional elements encoded by the human genome. The ENCODE Data Coordination Center provides the conduit for the consortium data and standards to be shared. These standards and data are essential for understanding the nature of human health and the treatment of disease.