dbAARD: DATABASE OF AGING AND AGE-RELATED DISORDERS

Abstract

Most old people suffer and die not of aging per se, but various age-related disorders (ARDs) like cancers, Alzheimer es disease, osteoporosis etc. It is well known that though the average global life expectancy has increased, the quality of life in old age has not. Hence researchers are now focusing not on increasing lifespan or \curing. aging itself, but finding the cause and treatment for different age-related disorders that afflict a growing number of people. The completion of the Human Genome Project and the HapMap project has provided us with the data necessary to link genome variations to susceptibility to complex disorders. Many genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted on the different age-related disorders to find single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are responsible for causing these diseases. Not all these studies are consistent with each other, but we now have a far greater knowledge of disease-variation associations than we did before. However, a repository for storing all the associations detected by these GWAS has been sorely lacking in the field of aging research. This work is aimed at filling that void. A disease-SNP list of 34 age-related disorders and the corresponding genetic variations (SNPs) that have been associated with them was prepared. This list includes information on the location and ethnicity of the population under study and the p value or odds- ratio that has been reported in the study. The variants were mapped to their reference sequences at the genomic, transcriptomic as well as protein levels. In the case of missense mutations, the codon and amino acid change as well as the position were also mentioned. The data was compiled from various publicly available databases like the NHGRI GWAS catalogue, GWAS Central, OMIM, dbSNP and others, as well as literature searches. A relational data model was then prepared to store the information in the list. The resulting database created in MySQL is in the third normal form (3NF) to make it more efficient and reduce data redundancy. A web-based graphical-user interface was developed using HTML to query the database. The interface is easy-to-use and enables users to find the required information by using different filters. The interface connects to the database by a Perl CGI script. This work is aimed at facilitating analysis of the large number of variants associated with age- related disorders. Such analysis may provide cues for deciphering the biology of ageing, thereby prioritizing drug targets for age-related disorders. The database is available as a free resource on the web at http://dbaard.dce.edu.