Keynote Speech: Storing and analyzing viral
sequences through data-driven Genomic Computing
– Abstract
Stefano Ceri1
1
    Politecnico di Milano, P. Leonardo Da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy


                                         Abstract
                                         The first part of the talk illustrates, in simple and data-inspired terms, what is a viral sequence, what
                                         are mutations, how mutated sequences become organized forming a “variant”, what are the effects of
                                         individual mutations and of variants, how viral sequences are deposited to public repositories (Gen-
                                         Bank, COGUK, GISAID). The second part of the talk presents the systems that were developed within
                                         my group, thanks to ERC and EIT funding. Specifically, I will illustrate (i) ViruSurf, a search system
                                         enabling free meta-data driven search over the integrated and curated databases, now hitting about 3
                                         million SARS-CoV-2 sequences, continuously updated from the above repositories; (ii) VirusViz, a data
                                         visualization tool for comparatively analyzing query results; (iii) VirusLab, a tool for exploring user-
                                         provided viral sequences; (iv) EpiSurf, a tool for intersecting viral sequences with epitopes - used in
                                         vaccine design. I will also hint at ongoing projects for viral surveillance and for exploring a knowledge
                                         base of viral resources.

                                         Keywords
                                         viral sequences, SARS-CoV-2 viral genome, genomic computing




SEBD 2021: The 29th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems, September 5-9, 2021, Pizzo Calabro (VV),
Italy
" stefano.ceri@polimi.it (S. Ceri)
                                       © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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