We’ve all been reminded across various social media feeds how Isaac Newton discovered calculus while “social distancing” during the Great Plague of London or how some of Shakespeare’s greatest works happened while in quarantine. Although the thought of being able to work from home was once a dream we wished for, as Adam Ruben, Ph.D. puts it, science-ing from home isn’t easy.

If juggling your altered home-life alongside the 9-5 work routine wasn’t challenging enough, it’s even more questionable how you can advance your research now that you have limited access to your laboratory, your data and your team.

As we all grapple with the new reality of lockdowns and work-from-home mandates, there’s now a new opportunity re-define what it truly means to do collaborative research and remote science anywhere in the world.

Updated: June 25, 2020 ------
The COVID-19 Research Community Showcase

The COVID-19 Research Community unites scientists across the globe in the shared purpose of accelerating our collective understanding of COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Researchers working on COVID-19 receive complimentary Community Scientist access to ROSALIND and the NanoString Early Access Program to facilitate rapid data analysis with real-time, global collaboration.

Today, we enhanced the COVID-19 Research Community through the addition of a new Showcase. ROSALIND Showcases provide a new experience for collaboration by summarizing highlights, capturing key observations and empowering community scientists with a library of COVID-related datasets, including some of the most recent research. 

The COVID-19 Research Community Showcase is accessible publicly at this link: https://rosalind.onramp.bio/showcase/covid19

Join the community effort to share, discover and accelerate our collective understanding of COVID-19.

Updated: May 20, 2020 ------
NanoString Early Access Program and the COVID-19 Community

Today, we announced our collaboration with NanoString for the development of new analysis tools for data generated on NanoString’s nCounter® Analysis System. This new analysis functionality is now built into ROSALIND™ and facilitates data visualization, exploration and collaboration for COVID-19 researchers performing critical host response studies on the nCounter platform.

As of the Early Access Program launched today, ROSALIND natively supports the NanoString COVID Panel Plus with targeted gene expression on human immune response with 10 supplemental genes (8 SARS-CoV-2 plus ACE2 human and ACE2 mouse). This new solution incorporates the methods and algorithms of NanoString nSolver and their Advanced Analysis solution within ROSALIND to accelerate insights from the nCounter instrument and empower global collaboration. 

Through the Early Access Program scientists and researchers are empowered with an end-to-end solution that streamlines the extraction, quantification, data analysis and collaboration to provide deeper insights into the gene expression of human immunology together with the viral response experienced during COVID-19.   

Updated: April 12, 2020 ------
COVID-19 Community Enablement - SARS-CoV-2 Genome & Virology

The SARS-CoV-2 genome is now available for new experiments and to support the COVID-19 Community. This facilitates analysis and discovery into the viral gene expression of COVID-19. Many of the recent NCBI public data submissions with SARS-CoV-2 samples and COVID-19 patient samples have already been processed and added to the Community Space.

ROSALIND Pathways has added a new Virology category and collection of Knowledge Bases to enhance COVID-19 research. New entries include Pathogen-Host Interactome (P-HIPSTer) and GEO Virus Perturbations. 

New COVID-19 datasets now available in the Community Space:

• Transcriptional response of human lung epithelial cells to SARS-CoV-2 infection (PRJNA615032)
• LY6E blocks coronavirus fusion and confers immune control of viral disease (PRJNA609134)
• Washington SARS-CoV-2 isolate sequences (PRJNA610428)
• Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 Raw sequence reads (PRJNA605983)
• Metatranscriptomics of two COVID-19 pneumonia cases (PRJNA601736)
• Relative timing of type I interferon response and virus replication determines disease outcome during MERS-CoV infection (PRJNA545350)

Updated: March 30, 2020 ------
Support for the SARS-CoV-2 Genome is in development now and will be released next week. We will also be posting several new public datasets from multiple locations across the globe. It's imperative that we join forces globally in open data sharing on COVID-19 so that we may track the strains, measure the progression of the disease and assess the efficacy of treatments.

If you have COVID-19 datasets, upload them today for free processing and interpretation.

Originally Posted: Jan 25, 2020 ------

Seeing the news on the growing threat of a Coronavirus pandemic, I’m reminded of just how interconnected we all are on this planet. Within a few short weeks, this deadly virus managed to make its way across species and oceans to a dozen different countries, affecting thousands of people. We still don’t know how severe this strain of Coronavirus will be and it’s hard not to be driven to join the fight against it.

We live in an era of unprecedented genomic technology with brilliant scientists that work tirelessly each day to gain deeper understanding into the inner workings of our biology and the diseases that afflict us. I believe that our greatest work stands before us and will be achieved through collaboration. While technical, organizational or resource constraints often slow our progress in other areas, we can overcome these now to collaborate for the cure.

Today we've launched the Coronavirus Community Space to provide open-access of ROSALIND, our discovery and collaboration platform, for fellow scientists who wish to join a community effort to share, discover and accelerate our collective understanding of Coronavirus.

After conversations with thousands of Scientists, there is stunning lesson in their feedback that every Pharma and Biotech manager should internalize: Collaboration is more valuable than the underlying analysis pipelines.

No matter how great the pipeline, if Scientists can’t explore, interpret and consistently collaborate on a common version of the data then the value invested in the experiment is lost, or simply not realized.

Like dark data, the latent insights in these experiments remain trapped. Interestingly, Pharma and Biotech institutions with a deluge of clinical trial and research data are looking for collaboration tools for their Scientists, not the fundamental analysis pipelines. The implications for oncology research, immunology, drug discovery and disease research are significant.

• Something every Scientist should read: we walked through Collaboration Spaces on ROSALIND, highlighting how it's now possible to collaborate in real-time on genomic data (like Google Docs). Read the post here. 
• We've forever transformed Public Data exploration. Follow this link for more information.
• Learn more about the latest capabilities, supported species and levels of access in this post on empowering scientists.  

Let’s face it, collaborating on genomics data is hard.

Working with Public Data is important to nearly every Scientist in our community. Unfortunately, it's harder than it should be to work with these valuable datasets.  We all see and hear the news each week of exciting discoveries and breakthroughs in leading research, yet accessing and analyzing these Public Datasets, especially from RAW (SRA), requires determination, persistence and more coding skills than should be required of Scientists today.

OnRamp BioInformatics welcomes you to visit us at the ASHG Data CoLab zone Oct 18th, 19th and 20th to Meet Rosalind™. 

This new platform was built with the researcher/biologist in mind, guiding you through a simplified bioinformatics process from experimental design to interpretation for analyses including transcriptomics and epigenetics. 

Good News Bad News for Personalized Medicine.

I’m reminded daily of the many advancements towards personalized medicine, but one elephant remains firmly planted in the room.

Recently I came across an encouraging article that touched on the increasingly collaborative nature of the efforts to bring about this new age of personalized medicine.  Data-sharing is reported to be on the rise in oncology, with groups like the Genomic Data Commons assembling harmonized genomic and clinical datasets, and making that information widely accessible to cancer researchers.