Rapid community-driven development of a SARS-CoV-2 tissue simulator

Yafei Wang; Randy Heiland; Morgan Craig; Courtney L. Davis; Ashlee N Ford Versypt; Adrianne Jenner; Jonathan Ozik; Nicholson Collier; Chase Cockrell; Andrew Becker; Gary An; James A. Glazier; Aarthi Narayanan; Amber M Smith; Paul Macklin

The nanoHUB platform (nanohub.org) 106 is a free, cloud-based service offering lectures, tutorials, and, of particular interest to us, interactive Web-based simulation tools. As its name implies, it is primarily focused on nanoscale science education and research. To make their simulation tools easier to use, nanoHUB provides a custom toolkit for developing graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, since 2017, they have adopted and promoted the use of Jupyter notebooks 107 , with accompanying Python modules to provide GUI widgets and visualization. Cloud-based computing and data analysis platforms are well established now, in both academic and commercial settings. For those who provide easy-to-use Web-based GUIs and APIs, and offer affordable pricing, it is likely their rate of adoption will continue to increase, especially among researchers who may lack the expertise or resources to install complex pieces of software.