Enhancing the Usage of Human Genomics data for the benefit of all. Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) project meeting

The Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) has created a comprehensive public atlas of gene expression and regulation across multiple human tissues. The resource is already providing valuable insights into the tissue specific mechanisms of gene regulation, enabling studies of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs), and alternative splicing, and enhacing the interpretation of genome-wide association studies and disease mechanisms.

The GTEx project has completed sample collection from 960 donors, and is QC’ing a final data and analysis release that will extend the RNA sequence data set to around 18-20,000 tissues. Whole Exome and Whole Genome sequence data will also be available for all donors.

The GTEx Community meeting is held annually and is open to the scientific community who are interested in learning more about the project and data, or who are already using the data in their research. Prior meetings have been held in the US at the Broad Institute (2014), the University of Chicago (2015) and at Stanford University (2016). This year, for the first time the meeting will be held in Europe,, in Barcelona in April, following the completion of the main producion phase of GTEx data.  It will aim to congregate a community of scientists from all over the world that are using, or that plan to benefit from using, the GTEx data.

The meeting will highlight sample collection and donor enrollment, current data sets and types available, various tools being developed for these data types, and results from applying them to the data. The relationship of the project to large scale projects and data sets, such as ENCODE, GWAS, BluePrint, FANTOM and other Cancer projects will be highlighted, and strong emphasis will be placed on showcasing a range of scientific presentations that use GTEx data. We encourage your participation and submission of abstracts for talks or posters!

This event is co-organized by CRG and B·Debate, an initiative of Biocat and "la Caixa" Foundation.