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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

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