Microbial Genomics collaborates with Microreact, an epidemic tracking platform

30 November 2016

The Microbiology Society is pleased to announce a new collaboration between Microbial Genomics and Microreact, a free data visualisation and sharing platform that allows scientists and health professionals worldwide to better collaborate to understand disease outbreaks.

Microreact users can combine geographic and temporal data to show when and where a disease outbreak has spread. Genomic and phylogenetic data can also be attached, showing how a pathogen may have evolved. Collaborators can add further data, helping researchers and public health officials to understand previous outbreaks, and prepare for future disease events.

Microbial Genomics is encouraging authors to upload their data files to Microreact, which can then provide interactive querying of the data via trees, maps, timelines and tables, and will be published in the article via a permanent web link. This allows our authors to provide extra context to their articles and lets our readers to fully understand the data by being able to visualise and explore the uploaded data, while promoting open availability and access.

Examples of papers published in Microbial Genomics that have already uploaded their data to Microreact can be found here.

Details on Microreact can be read in the article by D.M. Aanensen et al., Microreact: visualizing and sharing data for genomic epidemiology and phylogeography, Microbial Genomics, 2016 2. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000093.