What is EWAS Open Platform?

With the explosive growth of epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS), a large amount of data and knowledge related to EWAS have been accumulated. Although these data hold great potential for clinical translation, a standardized platform for data archiving, retrieving and exploration is indispensable. For this reason, we updated the existing data resources, EWAS Atlas (Nucleic Acids Res 2019, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ewas/atlas) and EWAS Data Hub (Nucleic Acids Res 2020, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ewas/datahub), and proposed EWAS Toolkit (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ewas/toolkit), an online tool for downstream analysis of EWAS result. Focusing on EWAS research, these three resources provide knowledge, data and tools respectively. More importantly, the quality and functionality for each component are enhanced by cross-linking information from each other. To this end, we present EWAS Open Platform(Nucleic Acids Res 2022, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ewas/), an integrated one-stop analysis platform for EWAS research.
EWAS Open Platform aims to integrate large, diverse and continually arriving EWAS data. There are three parts in this major release:
1. As a curated knowledgebase of EWAS, EWAS Atlas (updated) systematically curated and integrated 654,437 high-quality EWAS associations reported in 1047 articles (as of November 9, 2023), involving 213 tissues/cell types, 768 traits and 35,598 genes.
2. As a normalized data portal of EWAS, EWAS Data Hub (updated) integrates DNA methylation data of 146,678 samples from public sources and standardizes the metadata of each sample via a specific data normalization procedure. These data cover 1,210 different types of tissues and cells, as well as 658 different diseases.
3. As a collection of one-step online analysis tools, EWAS toolkit contains downstream analysis tools for EWAS, knowledge network tools, and batch correction tools for methylation array data.

EWAS Atlas

EWAS Atlas, a curated knowledgebase of EWAS. As one of core resources in the National Genomics Data Center of China, EWAS Atlas is devoted to providing a comprehensive collection of high-quality EWAS associations in support of systematic investigations of complex molecular mechanisms associated with different biological traits. Unlike extant data-oriented epigenetic resources, EWAS Atlas features manual curation of EWAS knowledge from extensive publications and accordingly incorporates a large number of high-quality EWAS data and a diversity of traits and ontology entities. EWAS Atlas provides open access to all curated data and thus would serve as a valuable resource for the global research community.
More details about EWAS Atlas are in EWAS Atlas documentation

EWAS Data Hub

To provide the epigenetic research community with a unified data repository that enables data sharing across EWAS, we develop EWAS Data Hub, a public repository that integrates DNA methylation array data (including 450K and 850K in current version) and comprehensive metadata from various data source (GEO, TCGA, ENCODE and ArrayExpress) based on a standard pipeline to minimize batch effects from distinct sources. Besides, taking advantage of big and high quality data, abundant of baseline data on different tissues and conditions are also provided in EWAS Data Hub.
More details about EWAS Data Hub are in EWAS Data Hub documentation

EWAS Toolkit

Taking advantage of integrated knowledge and data in EWAS Atlas, EWAS Data Hub, and Roadmap Epigenomics Project, EWAS Toolkit is developed to provide an online analysis platform for EWAS downstream analysis which includes trait enrichment, genomic location enrichment, GO & KEGG enrichment, chromatin state & histone modification enrichment, tissue methylation, expression regulation and motif enrichment. It provides a one-stop solution for downstream analysis of EWAS and requires no bioinformatics background.In 2023,it adds an online analysis tool for batch effect correction, allowing users to integrate data directly from multiple sources.Users can obtain methylation levels after noise reduction not only by uploading original methylated and unmethylated signal value files but also by entering the project id in NCBI GEO database.
More details about EWAS Toolkit are in EWAS toolkit documentation

Tutorial video

Tutorial video in Chinese


Tutorial video in English

How to cite?

EWAS Open Platform: integrated data, knowledge and toolkit for epigenome-wide association study. Nucleic Acids Res. Nucleic Acids Res 2021. [PMID=34718752]

Disclaimer

The information on this website is curated from publications and not intended for direct diagnostic use or medical decision-making without review by a genetics professional. Individuals should not change their health behavior solely on the basis of information contained on this website. If you have any question about the information contained on this website, please see a health care professional.

Licenses

EWAS Open Platform is free for academic use only. For any commercial use, please contact us for commercial licensing terms.