The European Radiobiology Archives (ERA)—content, structure and use illustrated by an example

Abstract

The European Radiobiology Archives (ERA), supported by the European Commission and the European Late Effect Project Group (EULEP), together with the US National Radiobiology Archives (NRA) and the Japanese Radiobiology Archives (JRA) have collected all information still available on long-term animal experiments, including some selected human studies. The archives consist of a database in Microsoft Access, a website, databases of references and information on the use of the database. At present, the archives contain a description of the exposure conditions, animal strains, etc. from approximately 350,000 individuals; data on survival and pathology are available from approximately 200,000 individuals. Care has been taken to render pathological diagnoses compatible among different studies and to allow the lumping of pathological diagnoses into more general classes. 'Forms' in Access with an underlying computer code facilitate the use of the database. This paper describes the structure and content of the archives and illustrates an example for a possible analysis of such data.

Anatomy ontologies and potential users: bridging the gap

“…Annotations were taken from three diverse public domain datasets—(i) gene expression from the ArrayExpress Archive [5] and Gene Expression Atlas [6], (ii) the Europhenome mouse-specific databases [7-9], and (iii) the multi-species radiobiology database ERA-PRO [10,11]. These were selected to provide a set of representative data from functional genomics studies.…”

“…The ERA-PRO database is a legacy database of the results of radiation exposure of a wide range of organisms. It contains data on more than 300,000 animals from experiments conducted in Europe, the USA and Japan from 1954-1996 [10,11]. …”

Big data in radiation biology and epidemiology; an overview of the historical and contemporary landscape of data and biomaterial archives

“…The resulting collection of datasets contains nearly all radiation biology studies using animals carried out between 1960 and 1998 in Europe, the US, and Japan, involving a total of more than 400,000 animals (Gerber et al 1996;Gerber and Wick 2004) (see Table 2). This exercise in international data acquisition and curation was begun by Dr. George Gerber but was picked up in a formal project funded by the European Commission in 2006 when it was decided to integrate all of the data across datasets (Gerber et al 2006). By then the data had been included in a simple non-relational database and had been hand curated from the original sources.…”

The Polonium-210 Poisoning in London

“…This archive comprehensively covers studies carried out on experimental animals and has been put together within the framework of the European Late Effects Project Group (EULEP) with support from the European Community (EC). This database (Gerber et al 2006) is being integrated into an international archive which includes data from both North America and Japan.…”