Samuel Ellertson


PROJECT 1

A. Gisaid.org

GISAID, which stands for “Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data” is a organization whos mission is to make information about the influenza virus, and it smany strains, openly available to the public and researchers. They provide a number of tools for researchers, such as influenza tracking tools. It is currently helping to track global cases of COVID-19 in an effort to help fight against it.

B. FoldingatHome.org

Folding at home is a worldwide project allowing people to donate their cpu/gpu time to help aid researchers in understanding protein folding. You can download their software and run it in the background, or have it run at scheduled down times so that it is not intrusive. Distributed computing is a way that the massive computational reuqirements can be met to solve complex problems without having to own a super computer.

C. NextStrain.org

Nextstrain is a tool based off of the GISAID data, that provides a whole host of visualizations and analysis tools for many different pathogens. These tools can be used by researchers to gain new insights into the spread and evolution of different diseases in real time.

D. Mra.asm.org (Complete Genome Sequence of a 2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) Strain Isolated in Nepal)

This paper, published in the American Society of Microbiology, details how the researchers sequenced the genome of a SARS-COV-2 sample. The resulting genome, of about 30,000 base pairs in length, it made available to other researchers, who can then analyze the genome in order to get a better understanding of the pathogen, and hopefully develop a way to fight against it.

E. Covid19.GalaxyProject.org

The Galaxy Project is an open-source project with the goal of providing “publically accessible infrastructure and workflows for SARS-CoV-2 data analyses.” It currently provides three different types of analysis: Genomics, Evolution, and Cheminformatics.

PROJECT 2

Link to notebook

PROJECT 3

Link to notebook