African Centers of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data Intensive Science: Building Capacity for Enhancing Data Intensive Infectious Diseases Research in Africa.

Africa faces both a disproportionate burden of infectious diseases coupled with unmet needs in bioinformatics and data science capabilities which impacts the ability of African biomedical researchers to vigorously pursue research and partner with institutions in other countries. The African Centers of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data Intensive Science are collaborating with African academic institutions, industry partners, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a public-private partnership to address these challenges through enhancing computational infrastructure, fostering the development of advanced bioinformatics and data science skills among local researchers and students and providing innovative emerging technologies for infectious diseases research.

Nephele: a cloud platform for simplified, standardized and reproducible microbiome data analysis.

Motivation: Widespread interest in the study of the microbiome has resulted in data proliferation and the development of powerful computational tools. However, many scientific researchers lack the time, training, or infrastructure to work with large datasets or to install and use command line tools. Results: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has created Nephele, a cloud-based microbiome data analysis platform with standardized pipelines and a simple web interface for transforming raw data into biological insights. Nephele integrates common microbiome analysis tools as well as valuable reference datasets like the healthy human subjects cohort of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). Nephele is built on the Amazon Web Services cloud, which provides centralized and automated storage and compute capacity, thereby reducing the burden on researchers and their institutions. Availability and implementation: https://nephele.niaid.nih.gov and https://github.com/niaid/Nephele. Contact: darrell.hurt@nih.gov.

Unlocking the Power of Big Data at the National Institutes of Health.

The era of "big data" presents immense opportunities for scientific discovery and technological progress, with the potential to have enormous impact on research and development in the public sector. In order to capitalize on these benefits, there are significant challenges to overcome in data analytics. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases held a symposium entitled "Data Science: Unlocking the Power of Big Data" to create a forum for big data experts to present and share some of the creative and innovative methods to gleaning valuable knowledge from an overwhelming flood of biological data. A significant investment in infrastructure and tool development, along with more and better-trained data scientists, may facilitate methods for assimilation of data and machine learning, to overcome obstacles such as data security, data cleaning, and data integration.