CovRadar: Continuously tracking and filtering SARS-CoV-2 mutations for molecular surveillance

ABSTRACT The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic underlined the importance of molecular surveillance to track the evolution of the virus and inform public health interventions. Fast analysis, easy visualization and convenient filtering of the latest virus sequences are essential for this purpose. However, access to computational resources, the lack of bioinformatics expertise, and the sheer volume of sequences in public databases complicate surveillance efforts. CovRadar combines an analytical pipeline and a web application designed for the molecular surveillance of the spike gene of SARS-CoV-2, an important vaccine target. The intuitive web front-end focuses on mutations rather than viral lineages and provides easy access to frequencies and spatio-temporal distributions from global sample collections. The data is regularly updated based on a scalable and reproducible analytical back-end. With this platform, we aim to give users, those with or without bioinformatics skills or sufficient computational resources, the possibility to track and explore mutational changes in the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene and to filter, download, and further analyze data that meet their questions and needs. Advanced computational users have the ability to apply the analytical pipeline and data visualization methods locally on their own data. CovRadar is freely accessible at https://covradar.net , source code is available at https://gitlab.com/dacs-hpi/covradar . GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT