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 at https://fairdomhub.org/projects/190#models.
For further information, please refer to the following PDF file.
COVID-19 Disease Map ―Building a Computational Repository of SARS-CoV-2 Virus-Host Interaction Mechanisms