Empowered genome community: leveraging a bioinformatics platform as a citizen–scientist collaboration tool

There is on-going effort in the biomedical research community to leverage Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology to identify genetic variants that affect our health. The main challenge facing researchers is getting enough samples from individuals either sick or healthy – to be able to reliably identify the few variants that are causal for a phenotype among all other variants typically seen among individuals. At the same time, more and more individuals are having their genome sequenced either out of curiosity or to identify the cause of an illness. These individuals may benefit from of a way to view and understand their data. QIAGEN's Ingenuity Variant Analysis is an online application that allows users with and without extensive bioinformatics training to incorporate information from published experiments, genetic databases, and a variety of statistical models to identify variants, from a long list of candidates, that are most likely causal for a phenotype as well as annotate variants with what is already known about them in the literature and databases. Ingenuity Variant Analysis is also an information sharing platform where users may exchange samples and analyses. The Empowered Genome Community (EGC) is a new program in which QIAGEN is making this on-line tool freely available to any individual who wishes to analyze their own genetic sequence. EGC members are then able to make their data available to other Ingenuity Variant Analysis users to be used in research. Here we present and describe the Empowered Genome Community in detail. We also present a preliminary, proof-of-concept study that utilizes the 200 genomes currently available through the EGC. The goal of this program is to allow individuals to access and understand their own data as well as facilitate citizen–scientist collaborations that can drive research forward and spur quality scientific dialogue in the general public.