Welcome Message
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected us in many different ways. We should be proud of not only taking the lead to tackle SARS-CoV-2 with high-quality biomedical research, but also striking a balance between normal university life and the need of keeping COVID-19 at bay. SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 have provided great opportunities for Teaching & Learning, Research & Innovation, as well as Knowledge Exchange & Global. Science plays a central role to bring about the beginning of the end of the pandemic. The technical terms of mRNA vaccine and herd immunity have never been so popular among us and in the community. As biomedical scientists, we should embrace the new opportunities and redouble our effort to discover new drug targets and to develop better vaccines and drugs. These are our obligations and responsibilities. The new academic year has just begun with full resumption of f2f teaching. We look forward to a new normal, which will certainly be much better than the past two semesters.
Professor Dong-Yan Jin Member, Executive Committee School of Biomedical Sciences
Teaching and Learning Summer Intern at Dr. Kelvin To’s Lab, Department of Microbiology Project CoronaTrend: A web-based application to identify SARS-CoV-2 potential critical mutations Feature Story
Throughout developing CoronaTrend, I have garnered a lot of invaluable experience that would take me a long way. As a novice in the world of bioinformatics and programming, learning a new language and using it on the fly in a narrow timeframe of two months is certainly challenging. However, through reading papers, cooperating with my team, and a lot of trial and error, I can achieve results I have not even dreamt of, including getting the project featured in GISAID, the largest SARS-CoV-2 sequence database in the world. Admittedly, CoronaTrend still has a lot of space for enhancements, which is why in the following months I will continue my work on improving the site. This includes integrating GISAID's API to CoronaTrend to allow real-time updates to the graph, allowing insertion mutations to be visualized, identifying co-mutations, and other UI performance optimizations. I really hope that whether the impact be large or small, CoronaTrend can serve as a useful tool that can aid others in understanding SARS-CoV-2. Last but not least, I would like to thank Mr. Jonathan Ip, Dr. Kelvin To, and the rest of the team for giving me the opportunity to have a taste of bioinformatics research this summer. Without their kind guidance and help, this project would not have been possible in the first place. In the future, I would devote my time to my passion for CoronaTrend and other bioinformatics projects, while actively seeking other interests in the field of research and medicine.
Thomas Tze-To Chan BBMS Year 2
During my summer internship, I have created CoronaTrend (https://coronatrend.live) , a web-based application that allows people to view the prevalence of different SARS-CoV-2 mutations through time. CoronaTrend also has a variety of filtering options, such as filtering by gene, country, and lineage. By tweaking the filters, it is possible to find interesting emergence patterns which may reveal mutations currently on the rise. This project isn't originally intended to be a web program. Rather, it was first created to show static images of prevalence trends of different SARS-CoV-2 mutations. However, as I continued my work on the project, I realized that amid the COVID-19 pandemic, making the data publicly available online will benefit many more people as there are currently no other public resources available providing similar data. This gave me the idea of creating interactive graphs that everyone can play and experiment with, which eventually evolved into the current CoronaTrend.
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