W64. AFRICAN GENOMICS DATABASES AND RESOURCES

International audience BackgroundSince the emergence of omics technologies, Africa has lagged behind in the area of large-scale genomics projects and accompanying bioinformatics compared to the rest of the world. In the last decade, Pan-African initiatives including the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) allowed the establishment of collaborative networks that contributed to the development of infrastructure, building resources as well as building capacity through the H3ABioNet project, a pan-African bioinformatics network for H3Africa.MethodsH3ABioNet has been developing bioinformatics capacity which, in turn, has led to the development of valuable resources that curate and serve African data with a more fine-grained view than is currently available in public databases, and provide access to summary information for data which are not publicly accessibleResultsH3ABioNet has established three online portals to help address the issue: the African Genomic Medicine Portal (AGMP), the African Genome Variation Database (AGVD), and the African Human Microbiome Portal (AHMP). Together the three portals enhance the visibility and accessibility of African genomic data within the public domain.DiscussionThese resources aim to complement and fill gaps in international efforts and improve the processing and analysis of African genomic data, inter alia psychiatric studies. Curation of these databases will be tailored toward efficient metadata data retrieval and adherence to newly developed and existing community standards, such as the African Population Ontology (AfPO), to promote FAIR principles. These efforts supplement the goal of proliferation and increase the impact of African research, providing the granularity required to conduct genomics research in genetically diverse African populations.