[index] About

https://serratus.io/about

Background

0.001% of the Earth's viruses are known to science. Emergent viral diseases such as COVID-19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus can have devastating consequences on human society. To prepare for (and to mitigate) the next pandemic, there is an urgent need to characterize the planetary diversity of viruses.

Serratus is an Open Science project to uncover the planetary virome, freely and openly.

Re-analyzing public data

The NCBI Sequence Read Archive database contains DNA and RNA sequencing data from millions of biologically diverse samples, collected over a decade from research labs across the world. We have undertaken a comprehensive re-analysis of the 10,000,000s gigabytes of data to catalogue every virus on Earth.

Planetary-scale data requires cloud-scale computing. The engine driving Serratus is a new type of cloud-computing architecture that we designed to process petabytes of sequencing data. Using Amazon Web Services we access upto 22,250 CPU allowing us to process data hundreds of times faster then was possible before.

The Open Virome

Our primary goal is to generate rich and comprehensive data to accelerate the global research efforts in fighting SARS-CoV-2 and other emerging viral diseases.

We adhere to the Bermuda Principles set out originally by the Human Genome Project, all data is freely and publicly available within 24 hours of generation. Our goal is to advance science, if you require assistance accessing any data please open an issue on our github and we can help.

Join the Serratus Collaboration