Over the last decade several research projects have obtained funding to genotype subsets of samples from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). Until recently the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) was not allowed to retrieve and redistribute the results/genotypes from these projects to researchers for reuse in other projects. To obtain access to these datasets each researcher would need to initiate a direct collaboration with the PI of the project the data originated from. Fortunately, a recent legislative change now allows NIPH to retrieve and provide access to these data as a single resource. The name of this initiative is MoBa Genetics.
See also the FAQ on our wiki
Compared to other large biobanks like eg. the UK Biobank, where considerable funding was secured upfront allowing for genotyping their entire cohort in a single effort, genotyping in MoBa have had to rely on several projects - each contributing with resources to genotype subsets of MoBa over the last decade. As a consequence, genotyping was performed years apart at different labs using different arrays. This increases the complexity of curating the resulting data into a single resource easily accessible to researchers for downstream analysis. Why this is currently a work-in-progress where several researchers are contributing aiming to provide high quality data to future projects.
NIPH would like to release a fully curated resource containing all samples in MoBa after close quality scrutiny with proper documentation and an accompanying backend to quickly provide access for new projects. However, this would mean researchers with the necessary competence to utilize the data in its current state would have to wait for us to complete this work. For this reason NIPH has decided to prepare two interim releases of the current datasets in our repository to all researchers through TSD.
It is worth noting that genotyping in MoBa is still ongoing and more data will become available as projects complete their genotyping efforts. This github repository and it's Wiki will be updated with more information about new datasets as they become available. We currently have two versions available.
- MoBa Genetics 1.0 Earlier called September 2019 Interim version
- MoBa Genetics 1.5 As of September 2020, this is (raw) data not yet published in version 1.0