May 26, 2020
Keio University
Systems Biology Institute
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
Researchers from Japan and around the world, including Assoc. Prof. Akira Funahashi of the Keio University Faculty of Science and Technology; Prof. Hiroaki Kitano of the Systems Biology Institute, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.; and Dr. Marek Ostaszewski, Prof. Rudi Balling, and Prof. Reinhard Schneider of the University of Luxembourg, are teaming up to reconstruct the molecular processes of virus-host interactions to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Comprising 163 members from 81 organizations in 29 countries, the research group have published the COVID-19 Disease Map to form a comprehensive, standardized knowledge repository of the interaction mechanisms between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the host.
SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language,http://sbml.org) and SBGN (Systems Biology Graphical Notation,http://sbgn.org) are standardization technologies that Assoc. Prof. Funahashi and Prof. Kitano have been working on since the early 2000s. These were adopted as the computational platform underlying the COVID-19 Disease Map. And CellDesigner (http://celldesigner.org), a software tool also developed by Assoc. Prof. Funahashi and Prof. Kitano, is being used to construct the COVID-19 Disease Map. The COVID-19 Disease Map will provide a graphical, interactive representation of the disease mechanisms and be a computational resource for analyses and disease modeling. It currently contains 13 models, including the viral replication cycle, transcription mechanisms, and signal transduction. All of these resources are available atCOVID-19 Disease Map.
For further information, please refer to the following PDF file.