Quite relentlessly, the COVID-19 crisis made transparent the lack of bioinformatic and photonic tools to understand even basic features of virus replication or, more strategically, approaches to fight outbreaks. The VirusREvolution initiative will provide virologists with the appropriate methods and tools to boost their knowledge of virus replication. The bioinformatics tools and photonic methods will be available not only for basic research in virology but also for diagnostics, surveillance, and pathomechanistic studies of future pandemic situations.
In the first funding period, our main focus is on tool development based on two viruses that we have selected for training. We will then begin to fine-tune these tools using a large set of validation viruses. This fine-tuning process will continue through the second and third funding periods to ensure the reliability and effectiveness of our tools. In the second funding period, we will intensify and expand our research on host-virus interactions. Projects that previously focused exclusively on a virus will now focus on the complex interactions between virus and host during infection. This will also deepen the interactions between different projects, as the study of virus-host interactions often requires a more holistic view of the biological system. In the third funding period, we aim to integrate morphological and omics data analyses of viruses and host-virus interactions (“viral morphomics”). The integration of different omics data is almost as old as omics itself; however, even today this integration is a non-trivial problem. We anticipate that viral morphomics will not only allow us to answer existing research questions better or faster, but also open new avenues of research.