📚 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.

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