The Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC)

Project Summary The mission of the NIH/NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC) program is to accelerate basic and applied infectious disease research by providing access to cutting edge bioinformatic tools, knowledgebases, and expertise, ensuring that our knowledge of pathogenesis can be translated into diagnostics, therapeutics and a public health response that mitigates the morbidity and mortality resulting from infectious diseases. The current NIH/NIAID-funded Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC; Contract No. 75N93019C00076) supported this mission by providing a bioinformatics knowledgebase and analysis platform covering all bacterial and viral pathogens. In response to the NIAID notice of funding opportunity, RFA-AI-23- 032, our proposal intends to maintain, improve, and expand the BV-BRC to combat future infectious disease threats, while maintaining our commitment to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, fostering a more inclusive scientific community, and ensuring equitable access to bioinformatics resources. BV-BRC will support bacteria, archaea, viruses, bacteriophages, as well as metagenomic analyses, with particular emphasis on the microbiomes and viromes related to infectious disease and public health. BV-BRC will continue to support the basic scientific research necessary to understand the biology of these organisms, their pathogenesis, and disease processes; support development of diagnostics and therapeutics to combat pathogenic organisms; and provide a rapid response framework to effectively deal with the inevitable and unpredictable outbreaks and pandemics. To support these overarching goals, we propose to extend and enhance BV-BRC through the following four key elements: 1) Maintain and enhance the BV-BRC knowledgebase to support exponential growth of data and usage and provide integrated access to omics data, metadata, analysis services and visualization tools, private user workspace, and user documentation to allow users to analyze public and private data and share or publish results; 2) Develop innovative tools and technologies to provide comprehensive services for viral and bacterial bioinformatics, metagenomics, drug development, and developing AI-driven natural language-based user interface for interacting with data and tools, with emphasis on improving user experience; 3) Offer critical bioinformatics expertise, outreach, and training to the community, with emphasis on fostering opportunities for students and researchers from minority and underserved communities by providing freely accessible training material and conducting training for instructors from underrepresented institutions, with particular focus on Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs); and 4) Provide cutting-edge support to rapidly respond to emerging needs, outbreaks, and pandemic preparedness by building on the tools and procedures developed during COVID-19 and Mpox pandemics and enhancing them to improve readiness and response to future outbreaks and pandemics.