Bioinformatics and systems biology in the fight against COVID-19

Understanding the virus-host interactions and the molecular disease mechanisms in COVID-19 is essential to develop effective treatment options and successful vaccines. The scientific research community all over the world has sprung into action to aid in the fight against COVID-19. Researchers at the Department of Bioinformatics at Maastricht University (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/bioinformatics) are at the forefront in curating computer models of COVID-19 molecular processes in the online database WikiPathways founded and maintained by the group (http://covid.wikipathways.org). The initial voluntary effort was a crisis response, and we are excited to announce that it will now be supported by a recently awarded ZonMw COVID-19 grant. We also joined the international COVID-19 Disease Map project with more than 200 researchers with the aim to create a comprehensive map of the molecular processes of the disease (https://covid.pages.uni.lu/). The consortium recently published their first commentary in the Nature journal Scientific Data¹.