Abstract
African genomic medicine and microbiome datasets are usually not well characterized in terms of their origin, making it difficult to find and extract data for specific African ethnic groups or even countries. The Pan-African H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) recognized the need for developing data portals for African genomic medicine and African microbiomes to address this and ran a hackathon to initiate their development. The two portals were designed and significant progress was made in their development during the hackathon. All the participants worked in a very synergistic and collaborative atmosphere in order to achieve the hackathon's goals. The participants were divided into content and technical teams and worked over a period of 6 days. In response to one of the survey questions of what the participants liked the most during the hackathon, 55% of the hackathon participants highlighted the familial and friendly atmosphere, the team work and the diversity of team members and their expertise. This paper describes the preparations for the portals hackathon and the interaction between the participants and reflects upon the lessons learned about its impact on successfully developing the two data portals as well as building scientific expertise of younger African researchers. Database URL: The code for developing the two portals was made publicly available in GitHub repositories: [https://github.com/codemeleon/Database; https://github.com/codemeleon/AfricanMicrobiomePortal].
Highlights
There is a bias in public genomic databases toward data from European and North American populations, and most of the public genomic databases have just a few datasets from the African continent [1]
African Microbiome Portal (AMP) enables data upload via a user interface, this will be only accessible by portal administrators
The H3ABioNet data portal hackathon was aimed at producing an African Genomic Medicine Portal (AGMP) and an AMP to fill the gap in these two fields with regard to African datasets
Summary
There is a bias in public genomic databases toward data from European and North American populations, and most of the public genomic databases have just a few datasets from the African continent [1]. African genomic medicine and microbiome datasets are usually not well characterized in terms of their origin, making it difficult to find and extract data for specific African ethnic groups or even countries. The Pan-African H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) recognized the need to address this by developing two online web portals: (i) African Genomic Medicine Portal (AGMP) and (ii) African Microbiome Portal (AMP) to provide links to curated African data in public databases. In order to progress the design and development of these portals, H3ABioNet agreed to support the recruitment of participants across its nodes in several African countries to participate in a portal development hackathon. The main objectives of this third wave of H3ABioNet hackathons were to design and develop two portals, for African Genomic Medicine and African Microbiome studies, and to curate and harmonize publicly available data for these databases H3ABioNet has previously organized two hackathons, one on the Malaria Drugs DREAM challenge [2] and another aimed at developing bioinformatics workflows [3, 4].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
