# Hacking the Pandemic: Global Research Community Gathers Online Against COVID-19

**URL:** <https://onehack.st/t/hacking-the-pandemic-global-research-community-gathers-online-against-covid-19/81054>\
**Category:** News & Articles\
**Tags:** learning, hacking, news\
**Created:** [April 20, 2020, 12:23pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/hacking-the-pandemic-global-research-community-gathers-online-against-covid-19/81054 "2020-04-20T12:23:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Aina](https://onehack.st/user_avatar/onehack.st/aina/32/167469_2.png) [@Aina](https://onehack.st/u/Aina)\
**Post date:** [April 20, 2020, 12:23pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/hacking-the-pandemic-global-research-community-gathers-online-against-covid-19/81054/1 "2020-04-20T12:23:08Z")

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![image](https://onehack.st/uploads/default/original/3X/a/4/a40a78a68a11bd9c67ef2bc47b77ea4ed1323eb1.jpeg)

Long-time Slashdot reader [DrYak](https://developers.slashdot.org/~DrYak) writes: _Over 500 scientists, software developers and clinicians joined forces in the COVID-19 virtual Biohackathon to develop new tools for working with the COVID-19 data. The outcomes of the event improved the accessibility of data, protocols, analysis pipelines and provided dedicated compute resources to execute demanding data analysis tasks._

 

The [COVID-19 Biohackathon](https://github.com/virtual-biohackathons/covid-19-bh20) was an online event from 5 to 11 April, initiated by Pjotr Prins (USA), Tazro Ohta (Japan) and Leyla Garcia (Germany). It had similar objectives and structure as the [face-to-face BioHackathons spearheaded in Japan](http://www.biohackathon.org/) and [recently adopted in Europe by ELIXIR](https://elixir-europe.org/news/hackers-meet-develop-life-science-resources). Participants were working in separate groups and presented their activities in a series of plenary webinar sessions. [More than 20 different projects joined the event](https://github.com/virtual-biohackathons/covid-19-bh20/wiki#topicsgroups), many of which were led by members from ELIXIR Nodes.

The results from this biohackathon will get mini publications on the preprints server [BioHackrXiv](https://biohackrxiv.org/)

ELIXIR (the European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information) is an initiative that allows life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data as part of an organised network.

Disclaimer: our group developed [one of the deep sequencing analysis bioinformatics pipelines](https://cbg-ethz.github.io/V-pipe/sars-cov-2/) presented there.

_I, for one, welcome our new [Linux-running](https://covid19-hpc-consortium.org/), Beowulf-[clustered](https://github.com/virtual-biohackathons/covid-19-bh20/wiki/Resources#cloud-computing) bioinformatics overlords._