The Research Environment
Our secure Research Environment provides approved researchers with a range of open source tools, shared storage drives, databases and research platforms linking genomic data to a rich set of clinical, phenotypic and longitudinal data.
Enabling scientific discovery and accelerating it into patient care
All analysis on the Genomics England dataset happens within a secure, cloud workspace called the Research Environment.
To access the data, researchers must first apply to become a member of either the Genomics England Clinical Interpretation Partnership (academics, students, and clinicians) or the Discovery Forum (industry partners).
Members will always have access to the most up-to-date research dataset and will be able to run analyses on the Genomics England high-performance compute cluster.
Features:
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Virtual desktop environment full of the most up-to-date genomic and clinical data
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Wiki-based platform and chat facility for communication with other researchers
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Access to the Genomics England high-performance AWS compute cluster
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Command-line tools are available for you to perform analysis
What is the Research Environment and how is it used?
This short video explains what the Genomics England Research Environment is, how genomic data is de-identified and added to the Research Environment, and how researchers can access this de-identified data to inform their genomic research.
What you'll be able to access
Data within the Research Environment currently contains the following types of de-identified information:
View summary data on the Public Data Browser
To see an overview of the data held within our Research Environment, you can use our Public Data Browser.
Data security within the Research Environment
To protect patient data, access to the Research Environment is controlled and secure, and only results of analysis can be exported.
An independent Access Review Committee examines and must approve all requests for access to data before users are granted access to the Research Environment.
Additionally:
- Movement of files into and out of the Research Environment is via the ‘Airlock’ system and is subject to review by a team at Genomics England.
- Researchers cannot copy and paste information from inside of the Research Environment to outside of it.
- Internet access within the Research Environment is only available for sites authorised by Genomics England (called ‘whitelisted sites’)
More about the Research Environment
Answers to some of the frequently-asked-questions about the Genomics England Research Environment.
