Tag: Viruses

New Norovirus GenBank Submission Service

Do you have Norovirus sequence data to submit to GenBank? Try out the newly-released improvements in our submission service for Norovirus data! The new service offers the following advantages:

Faster processing and shorter time to accession numbers
Improved user interface
Automatic Feature annotation

Submisssion_portal — **Figure 1.** The submission portal page showing the new option for submitting Norovirus data.

Begin a new Norovirus submission or see how to get started submitting other data to GenBank.

GenBank accepts a wide range of data to support scientific discovery and analysis on sequences from all branches of life.

Virus Hunting Data Science Hackathon next week in San Diego

From January 9th – 11th, the NCBI will help run a bioinformatics hackathon in Southern California hosted by the Computational Sciences Research Center at San Diego State University. We reached out to the global computational biology and virology community as part of this effort to make data more accessible.

The hackathon teams look forward to leveraging metagenomic datasets in the cloud to find data based on organismal content and update taxonomy – but most of all – hunt down new viruses!

Follow along with the event with NCBI tweets and see our work on GitHub.

NCBI to assist in Virus Hunting Data Science Hackathon January 9-11, 2019

We are pleased to announce the second installment of the SoCal Bioinformatics Hackathon. From January 9-11, 2019, the NCBI will help run a bioinformatics hackathon in Southern California hosted by the Computational Sciences Research Center at San Diego State University!

We’re specifically looking for folks who have experience in computational virus hunting or adjacent fields to identify known, taxonomically-definable and novel viruses from a few hundred thousand metagenomic datasets that we’ll put on cloud infrastructure. This event is for researchers, including students and postdocs, who are already engaged in the use of bioinformatics data or in the development of pipelines for virological analyses from high-throughput experiments. If this describes you, please apply! The event is open to anyone selected for the hackathon and willing to travel to SDSU (see below).

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5 NCBI articles in 2018 Nucleic Acids Research database issue

The 2018 Nucleic Acids Research database issue features several papers from NCBI staff that cover the status and future of databases including CCDS, ClinVar, GenBank and RefSeq. These papers are also available on PubMed. To read an article, click on the PMID number listed below.

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Introducing the new Virus Sequence Search Interface

BLAST is a powerful search tool, but often a search is just the beginning of the journey. We put ourselves in the shoes of a researcher who has just sequenced a handful of samples from the latest viral outbreak and tried to understand what information would be most useful. We also reached out to researchers in the field and asked: a) what questions do they really want to answer? and b) how can NCBI best provide the answers? Based on insights from those questions and answers, we developed the new Virus Sequence Search Interface (Fig. 1). The Search Interface is an NCBI Labs project, which means it is an experimental project, and we may modify the resource based on your feedback and experiences.

Figure 1. The Virus Sequence Selection Interface. — **Figure 1.** The Virus Sequence Selection Interface. The Virus Sequence Selection Interface accepts as input nucleotide and protein accessions, as well as FASTA and plain-text formatted sequences. The user selects either “Nucleotide” or “Protein,” depending on the sequence type, and selects the virus type from the pull-down menu below the text entry field.

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Summer 2017 NCBI Hackathon Products

This blog post is for researchers, students, and postdocs, as well as non-scientific developers, mathematicians and librarians.

This summer, we were quite busy running and cohosting hackathons. These events educate participants, allow for networking among computational biologists and produce bioinformatics software prototypes. Read on for a review of products from our Summer 2017 hackathons.

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NCBI’s Virus Variation Resource Enhancements Include Standardized Search Criteria

NCBI’s Virus Variation resource makes it easy to find genome and protein sequences for a number of viruses – no more stumbling through multiple synonyms to find what you need. Now you can search using standardized biological criteria and intuitive pull-down menus.

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NCBI researchers and collaborators discover novel group of giant viruses

Nearly complete set of translation-related genes lends support to hypothesis that giant viruses evolved from smaller viruses

An international team of researchers, including NCBI’s Eugene Koonin and Natalya Yutin, has discovered a novel group of giant viruses (dubbed “Klosneuviruses”) with a more complete set of translation machinery genes than any virus that has been described to date. “This discovery significantly expands our understanding of viral evolution,” said Koonin. “These are the most ‘cell-like’ viruses ever identified. However, the computational analysis of the virus genomes shows that these viruses have not evolved from cells by reductive evolution but rather have evolved from smaller viruses, gradually acquiring genes from their hosts at different stages of their evolution.”

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