About Us
The Big data and Bioinformatics Lab at BILSAB has a wide array of interests in solving biological problems. Specifically, the lab is interested in the area of biological data warehousing and applications of data science to the study of viruses, immune responses, vaccines, drug design, and disease biomarkers.
ViVA is our flagship project funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under 2232, International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers program for the period 2020 to 2023.
We hope ViVA will become a valuable resource for the scientific community in our preparation for future pandemics.
ViVA Goals
The ViVA team has undertaken the challenge of mapping viral diversity dynamics and chracterising targets for intervention strategies. The specific goals for ViVA are as follows:
- To develop a systematic bioinformatics workflow to process and analyze the viral sequence data and metadata collected from public databases.
- To develop the automated system using representative viral families.
- To test and improve the system for application to a broader set of viral families.
- To identify targets for diagnostic, surveillance, drug and vaccine designs from the viral families analyzed.
Unique features of ViVA:
- In-depth diversity analysis as the common core
- Four applications
- Spatial and temporal perspective
- Any viral species
- Comparative analysis
- Single platform: from data to report
Figure 1. The Systematic Bioinformatics workflow of ViVA. Data collection and processing is user dependent.