# Alliance Central: A platform for sustainable development of next generation genome knowledgebases

> **NIH NIH U24** · CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · 2024 · $5,241,011

## Abstract

SUMMARY
Model organisms are essential experimental systems for investigating and defining protein and genetic
networks, discovering new gene functions, and uncovering the functional consequences of human genome
variation. The Alliance of Genome Resources (aka, the Alliance) is a consortium of seven model organism
databases (MODs; Drosophila, C. elegans, budding yeast, zebrafish, laboratory mouse, laboratory rat,
Xenopus) and the Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) with a shared mission of facilitating use of biological
insights from model organisms to understand the genetic and genomic basis of human health and disease.
The Alliance seeks to serve a diverse community of biomedical researchers including basic scientists,
clinicians, and data scientists. The Alliance is organized as two interdependent units: Alliance Central and
Alliance Knowledge Centers. Alliance Central serves as a software platform developed using modular
infrastructure and common data models to and for the coordination of data harmonization and data modeling
activities across the Knowledge Centers. Alliance Knowledge Centers including MODs and the GOC are
responsible for expert curation and for submission of annotations to Alliance Central using community
standards for knowledge representation. Alliance Central represents a next generation extensible software
platform for knowledgebases capable of adapting to the rapidly changing data landscape and conforming to
modern standards for data management. Alliance Central provides the biomedical research community with
unprecedented support for comparative genomics via unified user interfaces and APIs for common data types
and promotes sustainability and operational efficiencies of core biodata resources. This U24 application
describes the plans for the enhancement and management of Alliance Central building on the significant
accomplishments of the Alliance consortium since it was launched in 2016. The focus for Specific Aim 1 will
be on expanding the Alliance Central infrastructure for ingesting, storing, and accessing the harmonizing
biological annotations from contributing Knowledge Centers. We will continue software development practices
that reflect our long-standing commitment to data management practices that align with FAIR (Findable,
Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. In Specific Aim 2 we describe our plans to continue
development of a state of the art literature curation system that can be adapted for use by a wide range of
biomedical model organism databases. The deliverables for this aim will include the incorporation of machine
learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence designed to enhance scalability and efficiency
of expert curation. In Specific Aim 3 we describe our plans for implementation and/or adoption of user
interfaces that advance the mission of the Alliance to facilitate comparative genomics to gain insights into the
function of the human genome. Finally, in Specific Aim 4, w...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10976322
- **Project number:** 2U24HG010859-06
- **Recipient organization:** CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
- **Principal Investigator:** CAROL J BULT
- **Activity code:** U24 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $5,241,011
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2019-09-18 → 2029-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10976322

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10976322, Alliance Central: A platform for sustainable development of next generation genome knowledgebases (2U24HG010859-06). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10976322. Licensed CC0.

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