What We Do

Biorepository for Psychiatric Research

The NIMH Repository and Genomics Resource (NRGR) is one of several data repositories funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH). We are the only NIH repository that specializes in offering the research community DNA, RNA, and cell lines from large collections of individuals with psychiatric illness and psychiatrically normal controls. At a minimum we provide basic demographic and diagnostic data on all our biospecimens; for most of our biospecimens we have detailed diagnostic data, frequently item level data on major assessment instruments, available for download. We also have genotype, DNA sequence, and gene expression data associated with a subset of our biospecimens.

Different data repositories specialize in managing different types of data, and data from a single individual may be deposited into multiple different repositories. The NIH, guided by the new strategic plan for data science, is working to optimize integration between repositories to maximize the utility of all collected data, but currently researchers may need to navigate several additional repositories to obtain all available data on a given subject:

• The NIMH Data Archive (NDA) holds clinical, imaging, and neurosignal data on subjects from a wide range of NIMH studies, but only a fraction of the studies in the NDA are in the NRGR, as the NDA includes very many studies without a genetic component.
• The database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) is an NIH-wide repository of phenotypic and genomic data, but only a fraction of the studies in dbGAP are in the NRGR, as dbGAP includes many studies that are not related to psychiatric illness.