The European Bioinformatics Institute: empowering cooperation in response to a global health crisis - PubMed (original) (raw)

The European Bioinformatics Institute: empowering cooperation in response to a global health crisis

Gaia Cantelli et al. Nucleic Acids Res. 2021.

Abstract

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/) provides freely available data and bioinformatics services to the scientific community, alongside its research activity and training provision. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront a need for the scientific community to work even more cooperatively to effectively tackle a global health crisis. EMBL-EBI has been able to build on its position to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 in a number of ways. Firstly, EMBL-EBI has used its infrastructure, expertise and network of international collaborations to help build the European COVID-19 Data Platform (https://www.covid19dataportal.org/), which brings together COVID-19 biomolecular data and connects it to researchers, clinicians and public health professionals. By September 2020, the COVID-19 Data Platform has integrated in excess of 170 000 COVID-19 biomolecular data and literature records, collected through a number of EMBL-EBI resources. Secondly, EMBL-EBI has strived to continue its support of the life science communities through the crisis, with updated Training provision and improved service provision throughout its resources. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of EMBL-EBI's core principles, including international cooperation, resource sharing and central data brokering, and has further empowered scientific cooperation.

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

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Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

EMBL-EBI Resources. Summary of all EMBL-EBI Data Resources as of September 2020.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Data flow through the components of the European COVID-19 Data Platform. Patient data is collected by national health data infrastructures and public health laboratories, which can be deposited in specific SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs (numbering 12 at the time of writing), Federated EGA (FEGA) and other data resources. This data feed into the COVID-19 Data Portal, which can be accessed by its user community of researchers, practitioners and public health specialists.

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

The COVID-19 Data Portal interface. The COVID-19 Data Portal provides a web entry point to services provided by the European COVID-19 Data Platform.

Figure 4.

Figure 4.

The Open Targets COVID-19 Target Prioritisation Tool. This example displays the results (listed in the centre window) of filters for targets that are: protein coding, have a direct interaction with a viral protein, have at least two drugs (for any indication) in a phase IV clinical trial, have a modulating compound in in-vitro assays, and have safety information (left content side bar). The right content sidebar displays further information for targets when entries in the list are selected. In this example, the small molecule target tractability button was selected for a particular target to display the level of predicted tractability information for the target.

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