The molecular life sciences will play a crucial role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of delivering new treatments and in developing vaccines. EMBL has launched a range of in-house initiatives to help support Europe's wider research efforts.

COVID-19 Data Portal

The COVID-19 Data Portal has been created by EMBL-EBI. The portal collects and rapidly shares available research data to enable synergies, cross-fertilisation and use of diverse data sets with different degress of aggregation, validation and/or completeness. 

The platform consists of two connected components, the SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs, which organises the flow of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak sequence data and provides comprehensive open data sharing worldwide, and a broader COVID-19 Data Portal.

The portal, available at https://www.covid19dataportal.org was launched in April 2020. A specific feature offered to EMBL Member States is the potential provision of national DataHubs where viral genome sequence data can be coordinated with controlled public release. EMBL has started to discuss this with Nordic member states. 

A range of data resources and other services to help tackle SARS-CoV-1

Alongside the data portal, EMBL has also launched RBPbase - A database of over 4000 RNA-binding proteins. This will help researchers identify cellular proteins that interact with the SARS-CoV-2 RNA genome.

The Protein Expression and Purification Core Facility will produce proteins for several corona virus-related research projects.

Learn more about how EMBL is contributing to COVID-19 research on the EMBL website.