Adaptació i càlcul de la matriu del bé comú a la Universitat de Barcelona. Curs 2015-2016

Projecte: FBG308603L’economia del bé comú és una nova forma d'organització de les empreses i de l'economia on es tenen en compte les persones i el seu benestar per sobre d’altres interessos. Fruit d’aquest model ha estat creada la matriu del Bé Comú, una eina que serveix per a mesurar l’impacte de les organitzacions des de una perspectiva d’utilitat social. L’objectiu del projecte és l’aplicació de la matriu del Bé Comú a la Universitat de Barcelona. Amb el primer cop d’ull a la matriu, però, les persones implicades al projecte hem considerat que molts dels indicadors i supòsits que s’hi recullen són difícilment aplicables a una institució universitària del sector públic com la UB i, per tant, caldrà una prèvia adaptació de la matriu abans de poder-hi incorporar la informació de la Universitat. A més, la matriu es fonamenta en una sèrie de valors que són esmentats però no definits amb concreció, tasca que considerem que s’hauria de fer prèviament per evitar equívocs interpretatius. De la mateixa manera, s’esmenten els grups de contacte de la organització. Entenem que la UB haurà de començar verificant que, efectivament, aquests grups de contacte s’adapten a la seva realitat i, de ser oportú, incorporar-ne de nous, eliminar algun dels existents o adaptar-los al context universitari

City-zen 'Menorca' Roadshow - Site Specific EVENT

The City-zen Roadshow's are 'site specific performance based' interactive events that bring together experts and city stakeholders 'onsite' to co-creatively design a future sustainable vision for their city. There would be nine European Roadshows over a four year period, the duration of a Roadshow being typically between 3 to 8 days. The Roadshow delivers energy and urban design workshops in which all local stakeholders are welcome and encouraged to join and to take ownership of the final outcomes. Outcomes that will allow the cities resources, both people and energy, to be directed effectively, by highlighting the energy challenges and potentials to be found in their neighbourhoods, and to finally present a sustainable ‘City Vision’. The Menorca Roadshow (Sustainable Island Menorca ‘Roadshow’) took place at the Institut Menorquí d'Estudis (IME) in Mahón on the island of Menorca, between the 24th & 28th of April 2017

NCBI's Virus Discovery Hackathon:Engaging Research Communities to Identify Cloud Infrastructure Requirements

A wealth of viral data sits untapped in publicly available metagenomic data sets when it might be extracted to create a usable index for the virological research community. We hypothesized that work of this complexity and scale could be done in a hackathon setting. Ten teams comprised of over 40 participants from six countries, assembled to create a crowd-sourced set of analysis and processing pipelines for a complex biological data set in a three-day event on the San Diego State University campus starting 9 January 2019. Prior to the hackathon, 141,676 metagenomic data sets from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Sequence Read Archive (SRA) were pre-assembled into contiguous assemblies (contigs) by NCBI staff. During the hackathon, a subset consisting of 2953 SRA data sets (approximately 55 million contigs) was selected, which were further filtered for a minimal length of 1 kb. This resulted in 4.2 million (Mio) contigs, which were aligned using BLAST against all known virus genomes, phylogenetically clustered and assigned metadata. Out of the 4.2 Mio contigs, 360,000 contigs were labeled with domains and an additional subset containing 4400 contigs was screened for virus or virus-like genes. The work yielded valuable insights into both SRA data and the cloud infrastructure required to support such efforts, revealing analysis bottlenecks and possible workarounds thereof. Mainly: (i) Conservative assemblies of SRA data improves initial analysis steps; (ii) existing bioinformatic software with weak multithreading/multicore support can be elevated by wrapper scripts to use all cores within a computing node; (iii) redesigning existing bioinformatic algorithms for a cloud infrastructure to facilitate its use for a wider audience; and (iv) a cloud infrastructure allows a diverse group of researchers to collaborate effectively. The scientific findings will be extended during a follow-up event. Here, we present the applied workflows, initial results, and lessons learned from the hackathon

Whole-genome sequencing reveals host factors underlying critical COVID-19

Critical COVID-19 is caused by immune-mediated inflammatory lung injury. Host genetic variation influences the development of illness requiring critical care1 or hospitalization2–4 after infection with SARS-CoV-2. The GenOMICC (Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care) study enables the comparison of genomes from individuals who are critically ill with those of population controls to find underlying disease mechanisms. Here we use whole-genome sequencing in 7,491 critically ill individuals compared with 48,400 controls to discover and replicate 23 independent variants that significantly predispose to critical COVID-19. We identify 16 new independent associations, including variants within genes that are involved in interferon signalling (IL10RB and PLSCR1), leucocyte differentiation (BCL11A) and blood-type antigen secretor status (FUT2). Using transcriptome-wide association and colocalization to infer the effect of gene expression on disease severity, we find evidence that implicates multiple genes—including reduced expression of a membrane flippase (ATP11A), and increased expression of a mucin (MUC1)—in critical disease. Mendelian randomization provides evidence in support of causal roles for myeloid cell adhesion molecules (SELE, ICAM5 and CD209) and the coagulation factor F8, all of which are potentially druggable targets. Our results are broadly consistent with a multi-component model of COVID-19 pathophysiology, in which at least two distinct mechanisms can predispose to life-threatening disease: failure to control viral replication; or an enhanced tendency towards pulmonary inflammation and intravascular coagulation. We show that comparison between cases of critical illness and population controls is highly efficient for the detection of therapeutically relevant mechanisms of disease

Adaptació i càlcul de la matriu del bé comú a la Universitat de Barcelona. Curs 2015-2016

Projecte: FBG308603L’economia del bé comú és una nova forma d'organització de les empreses i de l'economia on es tenen en compte les persones i el seu benestar per sobre d’altres interessos. Fruit d’aquest model ha estat creada la matriu del Bé Comú, una eina que serveix per a mesurar l’impacte de les organitzacions des de una perspectiva d’utilitat social. L’objectiu del projecte és l’aplicació de la matriu del Bé Comú a la Universitat de Barcelona. Amb el primer cop d’ull a la matriu, però, les persones implicades al projecte hem considerat que molts dels indicadors i supòsits que s’hi recullen són difícilment aplicables a una institució universitària del sector públic com la UB i, per tant, caldrà una prèvia adaptació de la matriu abans de poder-hi incorporar la informació de la Universitat. A més, la matriu es fonamenta en una sèrie de valors que són esmentats però no definits amb concreció, tasca que considerem que s’hauria de fer prèviament per evitar equívocs interpretatius. De la mateixa manera, s’esmenten els grups de contacte de la organització. Entenem que la UB haurà de començar verificant que, efectivament, aquests grups de contacte s’adapten a la seva realitat i, de ser oportú, incorporar-ne de nous, eliminar algun dels existents o adaptar-los al context universitari

COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative. A first update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a major public health threat, especially in countries with low vaccination rates. To better understand the biological underpinnings of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity, we formed the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative1. Here we present a genome-wide association study meta-analysis of up to 125,584 cases and over 2.5 million control individuals across 60 studies from 25 countries, adding 11 genome-wide significant loci compared with those previously identified2. Genes at new loci, including SFTPD, MUC5B and ACE2, reveal compelling insights regarding disease susceptibility and severity.</p