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COVID-19 Disease Map: LCSB researchers coordinate international effort:
COVID-19 Disease Map: LCSB researchers coordinate international effort
In the fight against the current pandemic, researchers of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg are coordinating an international collaboration to build a COVID-19 Disease Map: a comprehensive repository incorporating all current knowledge on the virus-host interaction mechanisms. This online tool will support research and improve our understanding of the disease.
In an article published this week in Nature Scientific Data, the researchers present their project and call for contributions from the R&D community worldwide.
Leveraging over a decade of expertise in disease maps and community building, the LCSB researchers are organising this project as a rapid response to the current epidemic. 162 contributors from 25 countries around the world are now participating in a collaborative effort. Extracting and assembling data from the existing literature and the fast-growing number of COVID-19 publications thanks to a rigorous and efficient organisation, they are building a reliable knowledge repository.
The disease map will provide a graphical, interactive representation of the disease mechanisms and a computational resource for analyses and disease modelling. "This platform will allow domain experts, such as clinicians, virologists, and immunologists, to collaborate with data scientists and computational biologists for a precise formulation of models and accurate data interpretation," explains Prof. Reinhard Schneider, head of the Bioinformatics Core at the LCSB.
Reference: M. Ostaszewski, et. al. COVID-19 Disease Map, building a computational repository of SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interaction mechanisms. Scientific Data 7, 136 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0477-8
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:27PM (4 children)
This is not a geographical map.
It's a map of ideas and facts about coronavirus, intended for fast communication between researchers.
And a kind of rapidly updated index.
Looks like I'd learn a lot from it if I understood the technical terminology.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 14 2020, @06:16PM (3 children)
Almost like ArXiv for Covid-19 data -- but it looks better indexed.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 14 2020, @06:45PM (2 children)
I looked at their git repository.
Actually, looks like some code written in R and a lot of xml files describing diagrams.
those diagrams look like charts how different chemicals, proteins, genes, enzymes ... interact with one another.
I'm not sure what the R code does. Some of it might produce the diagrams from the XML.
And I haven't found links to literature anywhere. But maybe I haven't looked hard enough.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @11:56PM
A fair bit of epidemiological modeling is done in R, I expect they're crunching data looking for patterns of disease progression due to underlying conditions. Got the link to their git repo?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @02:45AM
I gave them a cursory glance. It appears that two of them take data in different forms and translates them so they are all in the same format. The other two access an API in order to normalize certain references in the various sources of data.