Pathoplexus, developed by an international consortium involving three SIB Groups, is a groundbreaking genome sequencing database for viruses of public health relevance. It was awarded the National ORD Prize 2024, which highlights innovative approaches to reusing research data in interdisciplinary, collaborative, and educational contexts. Congratulations to the teams for this great recognition.
Unlike existing databases, Pathoplexus ensures open access and provides a cutting-edge infrastructure for interactive and programmable data exploration and download. Supported by the open-source software Loculus, the platform allows users to create their own database. The project is driven by a consortium of members from 10 countries across five continents, with contributors including SIB researchers from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel (Emma Hodcroft), ETH Zurich (Chaoran Chen, Tanja Stadler), and the University of Basel (Richard Neher, Cornelius Roemer).
The database is based on the software Loculus, which is among the resources contributing directly to the missions of our Centre for Pathogen Bioinformatics, launched in September.
