Navigating the phenotype frontier: The Monarch Initiative

Abstract

Introduction Introduction References The principles of genetics apply across the entire tree of life. At the cellular level we share biological mechanisms with species from which we diverged millions, even billions of years ago. We can exploit this common ancestry to learn about health and disease, by analyzing DNA and protein sequences, but also through the observable outcomes of genetic differences, i.e. phenotypes.\n\nTo solve challenging disease problems we need to unify the heterogeneous data that relates genomics to disease traits. Most databases tend to focus either on a single data type across species, or on a single species across data types. Although each database may provide rich, high-quality information, none is unified and comprehensive across species, over biological scales, and throughout data types (Figure 1A).\n\nWithout ...