Researchers from Columbia University in New York City built an open-access viral database to "to longitudinally explore respiratory viral infections, their interactions with other pathogens and host transcriptomic changes" per the project's description. Its creation could help advance research into the severity of illnesses.
The dataset contains two years of longitudinal information and is publicly available online as "The Virome of Manhattan Project: Virome Data Explorer," according to a Jan. 18 news release.
It was created as part of a study, published Jan. 18 in PLOS Biology, that focused on "characterizing the host response to common and often asymptomatic viral respiratory infections."
Authors collected samples from 214 participants who shared self-reported symptoms of respiratory virus illnesses between 2016 and 2018 as part of the project.
As part of the biological data collected from RNA-sequences, researchers also collected information on age, sex and daily symptoms.
"Our dataset uniquely has longitudinal/paired data from viral episodes that also include samples within the 20 days before and 20 days after positivity," the study authors wrote. "Most transcriptomic longitudinal analyses rely on experimental infections either in vivo or in vitro, and focus on the pre-symptomatic and acute phase of infection, limiting sampling to a few hours/days postinfection."
To make it useful to others for future, related research, the authors used the dataset to "depict the transcriptomic changes that occurred during infection, accounting for differences in symptomatology, the type of viral infection and the occurrence of coinfection with respiratory bacteria," all of which help paint a clearer picture of illness severity.