With the current situation around the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are several initiatives pushing forward to help finding solutions to successfully fight the virus. The global bioinformatics community is pushing its own efforts and organized the virtual COVID-19 Biohackathon. Starting today, contributors are invited to virtually work together on multiple topics and share their results openly via Github.
„The goal of COVID-19-BH20 is to create a cohesive effort and work on tooling for COVID-19 analysis. The biohackathon will lead to more readily accessible data, protocols, detection kits, protein predictions etc. We will also push for policy change where it comes to non-public or hard to access data because we are facing such challenges!“
Konrad had the chance to talk to one of the organizers, Leyla Jael Garcia-Castro, about the idea and implementation of this endeavor. Enjoy!