The Flu Forecasting Interpretation Visualization and Evaluation (FluFIVE) web application provides a user-friendly interface to explore probabilistic near-term forecasts of incident influenza hospitalizations in the United States. The source of forecasts is the CDC FluSight initiative, which since 2013 has served as a consortium to coordinate influenza forecasting efforts in the United States. FluFIVE provides forecast... MORE

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of accurate detection of known and emerging pathogens. However, robust characterization of pathogenic sequences remains an open challenge. To address this need we developed SeqScreen, which accurately characterizes short nucleotide sequences using taxonomic and functional labels and a customized set of curated... MORE

Abstract Forensic genetic investigations typically rely on analysis of DNA for attribution purposes. There are times, however, when the amount and/or the quality of the DNA is limited, and thus little or no information can be obtained regarding the source of the sample. An alternative biochemical target that also contains genetic signatures... MORE

Abstract To identify sequences with a role in microbial pathogenesis, we assessed the adequacy of their annotation by existing controlled vocabularies and sequence databases. Our goal was to regularize descriptions of microbial pathogenesis for improved integration with bioinformatic applications. Here, we review the challenges of annotating sequences for pathogenic activity.... MORE