COVID-19 Disease Map, a computational knowledge repository of SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interaction mechanisms
Marek Ostaszewski, Anna Niarakis, Alexander Mazein, Inna Kuperstein, Robert D. Phair, Aurelio Orta‐Resendiz, Vidisha Singh, Sara Sadat Aghamiri, Márcio Luís Acencio, Enrico Glaab, Andreas Ruepp, Gisela Fobo, Corinna Montrone, Barbara Brauner, Goar Frishman, Luis Cristóbal Monraz Gómez, Julia Somers, Matti Hoch, Shailendra K. Gupta, Julia Scheel · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2020
Abstract We describe a large-scale community effort to build an open-access, interoperable, and computable repository of COVID-19 molecular mechanisms - the COVID-19 Disease Map. We discuss the tools, platforms, and guidelines necessary for the distributed development of its contents by a multi-faceted community of biocurators, domain experts, bioinformaticians, and computational biologists. We highlight the role of relevant databases and text mining approaches in enrichment and validation of the curated mechanisms. We describe the contents of the Map and their relevance to the molecular pathophysiology of COVID-19 and the analytical and computational modelling approaches that can be applied for mechanistic data interpretation and predictions. We conclude by demonstrating concrete applications of our work through several use cases and highlight new testable hypotheses.