COVID-MVP: an interactive visualization for tracking SARS-CoV-2 mutations, variants, and prevalence, enabled by curated functional annotations and portable genomics workflow

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has reemphasized the importance of genomic epidemiology to track the evolution of the virus, dynamics of epidemics, geographic origins, and the emerging variants. It is vital in understanding the epidemiological spread of the virus on global, national, and local scales. Several analytical (bioinformatics) resources have been developed for molecular surveillance. However, a resource that combines genetic mutations and functional annotations on the impact of these mutations has been lacking in SARS-CoV-2 genomics surveillance. COVID-MVP provides an interactive visualization application that summarizes the mutations and their prevalence in SARS-CoV-2 viral lineages and provides functional annotations from the literature curated in an ongoing effort, Pokay. COVID-MVP is a tool that can be used for routine surveillance including spatio-temporal analyses. We have powered the visualization through a scalable and reproducible genomic analysis workflow nf-ncov-voc wrapped in Nextflow. COVID-MVP allows users to interactively explore data and download summarized surveillance reports. COVID-MVP, Pokay, and nf-ncov-voc are open-source tools available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and GPL-3.0 licenses. COVID-MVP source code is available at https://github.com/cidgoh/COVID-MVP and an instance is hosted at https://covidmvp.cidgoh.ca.