ELIXIR facilitates development of COVID-19 Disease Map
May 18, 2020

ELIXIR Nodes contribute to the development of a knowledgebase of SARS-CoV-2 virus host-pathogen interactions.

Announced last week in Scientific data, the COVID-19 Disease Map is an international effort to organise the molecular processes underlying the virus-host interactions in COVID-19.

Based on the rapidly growing body of scientific literature and curated by domain experts, the resource will allow visual exploration and computational analyses of molecular processes involved in SARS-CoV-2 entry, replication, and host-pathogen interactions, as well as host cell recovery and repair mechanisms.

The 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 robust disease models or in repositioning of existing drugs.

The COVID-19 Disease Map is led by ELIXIR Luxembourg (https://covid19map.elixir-luxembourg.org) and is being developed as one of the services offered by the Node. The MINERVA Platform, run by the Node, is dedicated to visual exploration and analytics of disease maps. It serves as one of the central repositories of the COVID-19 Disease Map, providing interactive visualization, search capabilities and conversion between systems biology formats.

The consortium includes 196 contributors from 31 countries, including several other ELIXIR Nodes (ELIXIR Spain, France, Italy, UK, Netherlands, Germany, EMBL-EBI and Norway). Thanks to close operational links between different ELIXIR Nodes, the initiative could quickly build on existing synergies and establish connections to other resources.

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