[KnowEnG] is an excellent effort” said Richard Weinshilboum, M.D., Mary Lou and John H. Dasburg Professor of Cancer Genomics and director of the center’s Pharmacogenomics Translational Program. Weinshilboum praised the productivity of the partnership between Illinois and the Mayo Clinic within the center.

Since the center’s inception, researchers have developed a novel resource, the Knowledge Network that integrates many different high-quality public genomic information sources into a comprehensive theoretical landscape of gene functions and interactions. By placing their new results into the context of the Knowledge Network, biomedical researchers can produce a high-powered analysis of new genomic and transcriptomic datasets.

Another innovation of the KnowEnG Center is the Knowledge Engine (also called KnowEnG), an analytical platform that takes advantage of algorithms that are used successfully in other data mining endeavors, including Google’s search functions, but have not been previously applied to interpretation of genomic data. KnowEnG enables researchers to include the Knowledge Network, as well as more traditional resources, as part of their analytical workflow.

KnowEnG is being designed with a user-friendly interface and standardized analytical pipelines that guide investigators who are less familiar with computational aspects of bioinformatic analyses, and also offers varying levels of customization depending on the user’s expertise. The center has contracted with Amazon Cloud so that researchers can run analyses on the cloud, without requiring local resources, thereby increasing the tool’s usability and making it possible to run multiple variations or aspects of an analysis simultaneously.

“Cloud-based computing can be very helpful,” said Professor of Computer Science and Willett Faculty Scholar Saurabh Sinha, who serves as the second Program Co-Director for the center. “Users would like to run those interactions in parallel and be done with it, and a cloud computing network makes that happen very easily.”

KnowEnG’s user interface will also be connected with an extensive online suite of bioinformatics training modules that can improve understanding of both computational and biological aspects of genomic analyses. Founder Professor of Bioengineering and of Physics Jun Song leads training activities of the center, which include a new partnership with Fisk University to provide bioinformatics education and research opportunities to minority undergraduate students.

An important focus of the next phase of work will be ensuring that KnowEnG is accessible to biomedical researchers at all levels of computational skill. Partnership with the Mayo Clinic as well as bio-focused research groups at Illinois will provide opportunities for several rounds of user testing and feedback. And after another productive year, the KnowEnG Center is excited to share their progress with the wider world of genomic biomedical research.