Bioinformatics of COVID-19 – challenges in understanding and predicting the emerging properties of COVID-19 variants

For the last year and a half we have all lived in the shadow of the largest pandemic in a generation – COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. At lot is being said and written about its costs in human health and human lives. But it has also brought new levels of understanding of the dynamics of viral epidemics and the evolution of viral genomes. With close to three million fully sequenced genomes associated with metadata about the time and place of virus isolation, comparative genomics analysis has become one of the main tools to understand the mechanisms of COVID-19 pandemic growth and SARS-CoV-2 evolution. The latest challenge is to understand the consequences of its rapid divergence into distinct lineages, some of which have acquired novel and dangerous phenotypes during the subsequent waves of the pandemic. In response, many new bioinformatics tools have been and are being developed to address these challenges.

To help discussion and exchange of ideas about how to analyze this massive amount of information, we invite the community of COVID-19 researchers to submit manuscripts to the Research Topic of ‘Bioinformatics of COVID-19 – challenges in understanding and predicting the emerging properties of COVID-19 variants’. We solicit contributions describing new ideas and approaches in the analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and integration with related experimental data, especially those that aim at the recognition of new variants and prediction of their phenotypes with a goal of early identification of future variants of concern.