Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center Website Now Available

Global Biodefense  February 26, 2022 The Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC), an initiative funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has launched a beta version of its website: BV-BRC Beta combining the data, technology, and extensive user communities from two long-running centers: PATRIC, the bacterial system , and IRD/ViPR, the viral systems. It is an information system designed to support the biomedical research community’s work on bacterial and viral infectious diseases via integration of vital pathogen information with rich data and analysis tools. The two resources host data on protein structure and function, clinical […]

Researchers developed a sequence analysis pipeline for virus discovery

Science Daily  December 3, 2020 Researchers in Finland have developed a novel bioinformatics pipeline called Lazypipe for identifying viruses in host-associated or environmental samples. Previously they published two examples of novel and potentially zoonotic viral agents that were identified with Lazypipe from wild animals that can serve as vectors. A new ebolavirus was identified from feces and organ samples of Mops condylurus bats in Kenya, and a new tick-borne pathogen Alongshan virus from ticks in Northeast Europe. These examples demonstrate the efficacy of Lazypipe data analysis for NGS libraries with very different DNA/RNA backgrounds, ranging from mammalian tissues to pooled […]

Has the Summit Supercomputer Cracked COVID’s Code?

IEEE Spectrum  August 2, 2020 According to a team of researchers in the US (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University Tennessee, University of Cincinnati, University of Kentucky, Yale University, medical schools) lung fluid samples from COVID-19 patients consistently revealed over-expression of genes that produce bradykinin, while also under-expressing genes that would inhibit or break down bradykinin. This is the core mechanism that explains a lot of the symptoms. They arrived at this conclusion by crunching data sets representing some 17,000 genetic samples while comparing each of these samples to some 40,000 genes. They highlight ten possible therapies developed for other conditions […]

Scientific infrastructure for virus research

EurekAlert  March 24, 2020 To simplify the exchange of data between the authorities, institutions and laboratories that are dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 virus researchers in Germany are providing the technical infrastructure: their Galaxy platform can handle analysis of Big Data in the life sciences. After being initiated at Penn State University, Galaxy was further developed by German researchers as part of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). Data are freely accessible online. Researchers who want to use the server do not need programming skills: all settings can be made using a graphic interface…read more. Data and analyses relating to […]