Hacking the Pandemic: Global Research Community Gathers Online Against COVID-19

Long-time Slashdot reader DrYak writes: Over 500 scientists, software developers and clinicians joined forces in the COVID-19 virtual Biohackathon to develop new tools for working with the COVID-19 data. The outcomes of the event improved the accessibility of data, protocols, analysis pipelines and provided dedicated compute resources to execute demanding data analysis tasks.

The COVID-19 Biohackathon was an online event from 5 to 11 April, initiated by Pjotr Prins (USA), Tazro Ohta (Japan) and Leyla Garcia (Germany). It had similar objectives and structure as the face-to-face BioHackathons spearheaded in Japan and recently adopted in Europe by ELIXIR. Participants were working in separate groups and presented their activities in a series of plenary webinar sessions. More than 20 different projects joined the event, many of which were led by members from ELIXIR Nodes.

The results from this biohackathon will get mini publications on the preprints server BioHackrXiv

ELIXIR (the European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information) is an initiative that allows life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data as part of an organised network.

Disclaimer: our group developed one of the deep sequencing analysis bioinformatics pipelines presented there.

I, for one, welcome our new Linux-running, Beowulf-clustered bioinformatics overlords.

Why not support Folding@home?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have they not already been working on this problem for months?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Structure only

[DrYak]

Indeed, Folding@Home is concentrating almost entirely on the 3D structure of proteins, by running a physics simulation (molecular dynamics: how all the atoms behave and move around).

The same type of problem can also be solved by other simpler approach such as homology modelling as done by Swiss Model [wikipedia.org], another group who also attended the same hackathon.

The ground truth method is to actually analyse the real 3D structure of a protein, by doing X ray scathering of crystals or NMR. (This has been done for some

Biohackathon

[Errol backfiring]

"Biohackathon" sounds like "Frankenstein for fun" to me.

Re:

[Applehu Akbar]

"Biohackathon" sounds like "Frankenstein for fun" to me.

Exactly, and that’s just what we need right now. Bring on the techie hubris!

how it is supposed to be

[sad_]

this is how science should be done, united, if there is one thing that we should keep after this pandemic is over, it would be this.
but unfortunatly, it will probably be mass surveillance, as apparently that is 'not easy to reverse'.

hope for the best

[Isabelle12Foster]

There is hope that such a consolidation of scientists will be able to achieve a result. I don't remember a time when so many scientists were depleted in one group for one purpose. When I worked at https://papersowl.com/research... [papersowl.com] I was often invited to participate in research projects. While doing research papers for sale, I often wondered what benefits I could bring to society. And perhaps now all scientists, regardless of what they are doing at the moment, should concentrate on research that is so import