Investigators in India present a population genome database called IndiGenomes, developed to house whole-genome sequence data generated for more than 1,000 healthy individuals who were profiled through the pilot phase of a project called IndiGen. "The IndiGenomes database will help clinicians and researchers in exploring the genetic component underlying medical conditions," the team says, noting that the online collection currently contains information spanning almost 55.9 million SNPs identified in 1,029 seemingly healthy individuals from a range of locations in India, along with insights into allele frequencies and other annotate features found in individuals from different parts of the country.
A team from Taiwan describes a drug database designed to uncover potential treatments for SARS-CoV-2. The DockCoV2 brings together "molecular docking" scores for viral proteins and related host receptor proteins such as the ACE2 receptor in humans, relative to more than 3,1000 approved drugs based on predicted binding affinities, the researchers note. "DockCoV2 focuses on predicting the binding affinity of [US Food and Drug Administration]-approved and Taiwan Health Insurance drugs with … seven [viral or host] proteins," the authors write, noting that corresponding experimental insights from published studies are included on the DockCoV2 database.
Finally, researchers in Italy and Germany report on ViruSurf, a public database and searchable web interface, that brings together sequences, metadata, biological insights, and more for viruses housed in a handful of independent databases such as GenBank or RefSeq. The collection includes SARS-CoV-2 isolates from the current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as viruses such as MERS-CoV, the Ebola virus, and the original SARS culprit SARS-CoV, the authors note. "ViruSurf provides a single point of access to curated and integrated data resources about several virus species," they write, calling the database "a tool for assisting the research community" that "will progressively increase with the growth of available sequences and of the knowledge about viruses."