Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, laboratories around the world have been generating a huge amount of data. The timely sharing of research data plays a critical role in advancing the understanding of COVID-19 and accelerating the pace of discovery.
In this context, some data repositories are growing in importance and some have experienced an increase in the number of data submissions. Zoom in on a few of them:
- The GISAID Initiative promotes the international sharing of all influenza virus sequences, related clinical and epidemiological data associated with human viruses, and geographical as well as species-specific data associated with avian and other animal viruses.
- The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) provides a comprehensive record of the world’s nucleotide sequencing information, covering raw sequencing data, sequence assembly information and functional annotation.
- The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) is a service for permanent archiving and sharing of all types of personally identifiable genetic and phenotypic data resulting from biomedical research projects.
- BioSamples stores and supplies descriptions and metadata about biological samples used in research and development by academia and industry.
- PRoteomics IDEntification Database (PRIDE) supports the deposition of proteomics datasets from any experimental approach.
- ChEMBL is a manually curated database of bioactive molecules with drug-like properties. It brings together chemical, bioactivity and genomic data to aid the translation of genomic information into effective new drugs.
- IntAct provides a freely available, open source database system and analysis tools for molecular interaction data.
- The Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) is a public repository for electron microscopy density maps of macromolecular complexes and subcellular structures.
Most of these repositories are resources for the COVID-19 Data Portal, which brings together relevant datasets for sharing and analysis. The aim is to enable researchers to upload, access and analyse COVID-19 related reference data and specialist datasets.
