An international virtual hackathon to build tools for the analysis of structural variants within species ranging from coronaviruses to vertebrates

Abstract

In October 2020, 62 scientists from nine nations worked together remotely in the Second Baylor College of Medicine & DNAnexus hackathon, focusing on different related topics on Structural Variation, Pan-genomes, and SARS-CoV-2 related research. The overarching focus was to assess the current status of the field and identify the remaining challenges, and furthermore, how to combine the strengths of the different interests to drive research and method development forward. Over the four days, eight groups each designed and developed new open-source methods to improve the identification and analysis of variations among species, including humans and SARS-CoV-2. These included improvements in SV calling, genotyping, annotations and filtering, together with advancements in benchmarking existing methods. Furthermore, groups focused on the diversity of SARS-CoV-2. Daily discussion summaries and methods are available publicly at https://github.com/collaborativebioinformatics, providing valuable insights for both participants and the research community.