ThermoMutDB e SARS-COV-2 Africa Dashboard: abordagens de ciência de dados para integração, análise e vigilância de dados biológicos

Abstract

The exponential growth in the generation and availability of biological data, including experimental data and genome sequences of diverse organisms, has boosted, in recent decades, the emergence of computational tools that seek to predict and understand biological phenomena. In addition, some initiatives seek to inform and assist general public health and sanitary decision-making. In order to make it possible to develop these and many other relevant works and analyses, several databases have been maintained as a resource to guide innovation and the generation of new biological insights. In this context, the paradigm shift from quantity to quality of data and information has been proven increasingly necessary and crucial. However, different challenges are encountered according to the data maintenance policy. Databases used for research in Bioinformatics, and also in other areas, can be open, where the community is responsible for maintenance and verification, or maintained by institutions that regulate the use of this data. In this work, we proposed to evaluate two relevant problems in different areas of activity of Bioinformatics to understand how biological data can be annotated and integrated in a sustainable and optimized way to answer relevant scientific questions and also inform the population. As a result, we present two approaches that deal with two different contexts, ThermoMutDB and SARS-CoV-2 Africa dashboard, with data quality and scientific information delivery as a central focus. ThermoMutDB is a public, manually curated database of protein thermodynamic data. The SARS-CoV-2 Africa dashboard is an interactive tool for visualizing and analyzing COVID-19 genomic data from the African continent. ThermoMutDB proposes a collaborative data verification paradigm for building curated databases with data from the biomedical literature. The dashboard uses data from GISAID (an initiative that maintains and regulates the genomic data of this disease worldwide) through an agreement between the institutions. It allows the general public access to real-time data in order to guide decision-making in response to the current pandemic. Results show that the tools have been widely used and have the potential to impact future research in protein engineering and genomic surveillance, in addition to the possibility of being replicated in other contexts.