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Abstract

As viruses continue to evolve, new strains present new public health challenges with respect to vaccine efficacy, diagnostic testing, and treatment efficacy, among other consequences. Timely and accurate sharing of data on viral variant functional effects is critical for informed public health responses, including surveillance, diagnostics, and policy decisions. To this end, we developed the Variant Impact Reporting Ontology (VIRO), a virus-agnostic ontology model that enables standardized, semantically rich representation of viral variants (here defined as viral mutations or sets of viral mutations), their functional effects, and supporting literature. We also present spreadsheet-style data-validation templates that can be used to report viral variant functional effects in a standardized way. Together, the ontology and templates offer the viral genomics and public health communities a standardized, scalable approach for sharing viral variant functional effects data and assessing the potential consequences of circulating strains.