Bo Liu

TL;DR: An integrated and automatic pipeline, VFanalyzer, is introduced to VFDB to systematically identify known/potential VFs in complete/draft bacterial genomes through a context-based data refinement process for VFs encoded by gene clusters that can achieve relatively high specificity and sensitivity without manual curation.

TL;DR: A novel bat-borne CoV was identified that is associated with severe and fatal respiratory disease in humans and the amino acid sequence of the tentative receptor-binding domain resembles that of SARS-CoV, indicating that these viruses might use the same receptor.

TL;DR: The virulence factor database (VFDB) recently improved two aspects of the infrastructural dataset of VFDB and promoted the usability of the database in the big data era for the bioinformatic mining of the explosively growing data regarding bacterial VFs.

TL;DR: The expression of proinflammatory genes, especially chemokines, was markedly elevated in COVID-19 cases compared to community-acquired pneumonia patients and healthy controls, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 infection causes hypercytokinemia.

TL;DR: The virulence factor database (VFDB, http://www.mgc.ac.cn/VFs/) is dedicated to presenting a comprehensive knowledge base and a versatile analysis platform for bacterial virulence factors as mentioned in this paper.