On the Project of an Effective Software Platform for Working with Genetic Data of Respiratory Viruses

Progress in sequencing technologies, i.e. reading the nucleotide sequences of living organisms, has led to a rapid growth of the amount of genetic data. The largest global projects that accumulate this information and provide online access to it are Genbank and GISAID. Also they provide basic capabilities for analyzing this data online, but they are quite limited. This significantly limits our abilities to effectively solve a number of scientific problems and tasks, so we decided to develop our own domestic (Russian) web platform with capabilities which we need. The main goal of this project is to provide a team of researchers with the opportunity to effectively solve problems in bioinformatics, virology and epidemiology, based on modern, effective, reasonably selected software solutions operating with high performance and providing many useful functionalities which can be extended by adding new necessary programs for analyzing and modeling. The web platform we are implementing will allow to download, store, search and analyze genomic sequences of viruses, such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2 and, in perspective, other viral pathogens. In addition, the project will develop and advance through efforts of IT part of our team taking into account actual needs of bioinformaticians and virologists. We plan to make it available to researchers around the world and periodically update both the software and the data (from open sources) to improve the convenience and efficiency for scientists working in the relevant areas.