Bioinformatics helping to mitigate the impact of COVID-19-Editorial

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) became known to the world at the end of 2019 [1]. The severity of the pandemic and its worldwide spread provoked an unprecedented effort of the scientific community and a lot of new research was conducted, especially by the medicine, biology, public health, bioinformatics and computer science researchers, that led to the rapid development of several novel vaccines [2]. At the biological level, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research involves several themes, including high-throughput technologies such as Next-Generation Sequencing for detecting the genome of SARS-CoV-2, databases storing SARS-CoV-2 genomes and variants, bioinformatics software tools and databases for analyzing and storing host–virus interactions [3]. At the medical level and in particular when considering the search for therapeutic strategies, the identification of COVID-19 biomarkers, the discovery of therapeutic targets for drugs and the bioinformatics approaches for drug repurposing, i.e. the use of already available drugs for the COVID-19 disease, are main research themes. At the epidemiological and public-health level, main research themes regard: the systematic collection and sharing of data about the spread of the infection, such as the number of cases, hospitalized, ICU and deceased patients, that may be helpful to manage the pandemic [4]; the biological tests for testing, and the computational methods for tracing and tracking infected people; the exploitation of the vast clinical data stored into the Electronic Health Records of COVID-19 patients [5]; the analysis of the impact of lockdown measures in various contexts, e.g. at socioeconomic level, that may benefit from sentiment analysis methods; and finally measures to help quarantined people, such as local healthcare service, robotics and virtual assistants. Finally, those unprecedented research efforts yield an overwhelming volume of scientific publications that require new methods and tools to improve learning from SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 literature, such as novel text mining and natural language processing techniques to distill relevant information [6]. This Special Issue aims to collect relevant scientific contributions on methods and applications of bioinformatics and informatics in themes related to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. In particular, the special issue is organized in two main strands: one on Bioinformatics helping to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 and another one on Informatics helping to mitigate the impact of Covid-19. Here, we present the first-strand Bioinformatics helping to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 that comprises more than 60 manuscripts, each dealing with one of the following central key issues, as detailed below.