ALSPAC The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children: An international resource for population genomics and lifecourse epidemiology. Core Programme Support 2011-2013. (360G-Wellcome-092731_Z_10_Z)

This proposal will further develop the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and their Children (ALSPAC) resource in ways that render it of maximal value to the scientific community. Extensive data have been collected on over 10,000 mothers initially recruited when pregnant in the early 1990s, their offspring and their partners. This includes a substantial biobank of biological samples, data from repeated clinical assessments and questionnaires on the children, a single clinical assessment and rep eat questionnaires on the mothers, and repeat questionnaires on the partners. The resource will be developed by (1) further questionnaire follow-up as the adolescents transition into adulthood, and their parents as they move towards later middle age; (2) recruitment of the grandchildren of the mothers originally recruited that will total over 1500-2000 over the award period - creating a unique three-generational resource; (3) a clinical examination and further biological sample collection on t he fathers; (4) establishment of the study as a recruit-by-genotype resource; (5) consent from siblings of the original ALSPAC children to enter the study and piloting low-cost data collection from them; (6) developing remote secure access data handling and other approaches to allow maximal utilisation of the data.