The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the importance of metadata standards

“For all those who publish original data, provide a clear description of your data” says Max Roser, program director of “Our World in Data”, a global database on testing for COVID-19 from the University of Oxford. The COVID-19 crisis has painfully highlighted the importance of maximizing the reusability of data. Descriptions of data are known as metadata. It is an… Continue reading

ELIXIR facilitates development of comprehensive disease map for COVID-19

In an international effort to organise the molecular processes underlying the SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interactions in COVID-19, 196 contributors from 31 countries have created a visual exploration and analytics tool. This resource will improve researchers’ understanding of COVID-19 and speed up the development of efficient diagnostics and therapies. It will also facilitate collaboration between clinicians, virologists or computational biologists in developing… Continue reading

ZonMw’s COVID19 research program online

The Dutch funder organisation ZonMW has fast-track calls for COVID19 funding. If you haven’t visited their website to see if your research is eligible for funding please do so. The (2nd) ZonMW program has 3 focus areas: Predictive diagnostics & treatment Care and prevention Societal dynamics More info can be found here.

Join the online Biohackathon April 5-11th #covid_19_bh20

Goals of the online Biohackathon April 5-11th 2020 are readily accessible data, protocols, detection kits, protein predictions etc. Anybody can contribute- no prior experience with (Bio)Hackathons is required. Working groups include FAIR data, workflows and pipelines, pangenomes and variation graphs, machine learning, text mining and visualisations. More information can be found here.

Urgent COVID-19 data hurdles and how to tackle them

During the COVID-19 pandemic researchers are working around the clock to make vaccines, advance medical treatment and protocols for the sick. We are in an unprecedented situation where the whole world has to deal with this pandemic. In previous weeks we have seen the real strength of data sharing. However, there are still lots of hurdles when it comes to… Continue reading