University of Tartu
The University of Tartu (UTARTU), founded in 1632 is the oldest, largest and the only classical university in Estonia with more than 14,000 students and 1,500 academic staff members. As Estonia’s national university, UTARTU stresses the importance of international co-operation and partnerships with reputable research universities all over the world. UTARTU is Estonia’s leading centre of research and training, focusing on subjects as diverse as medicine and philosophy, genetics and computer science. UTARTU currently ranks among the top 1.2 percent of the world's best universities (Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020) and belongs to the top 1% of the world's most-cited universities and research institutions in 12 fields, including clinical medicine, molecular biology and genetics.
The focus of the Institute of Genomics (IG) at UTARTU is to understand the role of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors in health and disease. The institute hosts the Estonian Biobank, conducted according to the Estonian Human Genes Research Act (HGRA). The current cohort size is ca 200,000 individuals, reflecting the age, sex and geographical distribution of the adult Estonian population. The database is regularly linked with national registries, hospital databases, and the database of the national health insurance fund to get up-to-date information. Research at IG has focused on the health trajectories of biobank participants, their respective genetic profiles, behavioural information and applying the obtained data to improve public health and advancing personalised medicine in Estonia.
Role of the institution within ENLIGHTENme
UTARTU participates in the project by providing its competences in genome research and biobanking. RTD activities will exploit UTARTU expertise on genotyping, imputation, genome-wide association studies, bioinformatics, biomedicine and epidemiology. UTARTU is mostly involved in work package 3 as one of the recruitment and study centre of participants taking part of the population based lighting study on older adults to assess the impact of outdoor and indoor lighting innovations on entrainment of circadian rhythms, sleep and personal light exposure, mental and physical health.