Given the increasing importance of genomic analyses in basic and translational cancer research and the phenomenal developments in genetic engineering and genetic screening technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, transposons and RNAi, it will be a central requirement for the consortium to implement sequencing and bioinformatics, as well as data integration capabilities. S02 will be a platform for cancer genomic analyses that will provide state of the art sequencing and bioinformatics support, covering a broad spectrum of applications, including whole-exome/genome sequencing, Chip-Seq, targeted SNP resequencing, RNA-Seq, transposon insertion site sequencing, multiplexed amplicon-based sequencing of CRISPR/Cas9 targets or viral integration sites and others. All projects within this CRC will require sequencing and bioinformatics support.

A second major aim of S02 will be to characterize the genomic landscapes of mouse PDAC cell line resources and human PDAC organoid collections assembled within this consortium; and to integrate these genomic data with high-throughput drug screening, proteomic, histopathologic, clinical/prognostic information and other phenotypic data that will be produced in the different projects or collected in the clinic. These resources will be a critical experimental platform that will be extensively used by CRC members to dissect the molecular basis of various phenotypes. All data will be curated and made available through a user-friendly and intuitive biomedical data analytics and visualization platform (tranSMART, cBioPortal) that will specifically be developed for this purpose.