The German Twin Registry (GERTRUD): Towards Harmonized, Multisource Twin Research

Twin registries worldwide increasingly function as large-scale research infrastructures, enabling standardized phenotyping across the lifespan, integration of biological and environmental data streams, and international cross-cohort collaborative research and replications. This development is also taking place in Germany. The GERman Twin Registry Under Development (GERTRUD; www.gertrud.info) was established in 2022 as the first nationwide research platform for recruiting twins and higher order multiples of all ages within Germany to support the large-scale genetically informative psychological, sociological, health, and neuroscience twin research at national and international levels. GERTRUD is being developed as a modular infrastructure that supports classical and extended twin family designs, combining annual core survey waves with optional embedded modules for intensive phenotyping (e.g., neuroimaging, smartphone-based assessments), biosampling, and linkage of participants' residential context to external geographic datasets via geospatial information systems (GIS). To operate within Germany's stringent data protection landscape, GERTRUD implements project-specific pseudonymisation, role-based access control, and contract-governed remote analysis access. This article describes GERTRUD's governance and legal-technical framework, its multisource data architecture, and the potential for collaboration across Germany and internationally. Examples of early data implementations further illustrate that the continuously collected multimodal twin data constitute a critical asset, essential for successful harmonization, replication, and collaborative and integrative behavioral genetics research.