‘When we were doing the project, there were only mainly research labs that had NGS. Vandamme led a project called VIROGENESIS to develop new tools to help analyse and interpret the data that comes from sequencing, particularly for laboratories that were not used to dealing with sophisticated genetic analysis. Next-generation sequencing, or NGS, can generate enormous amounts of data, and the challenge becomes finding ways to analyse it properly. As we get more and more sequences, the more and more accurate the numbers are,’ said Professor Anne-Mieke Vandamme from KU Leuven, Belgium. ‘You can see from the sequences how the virus spreads, the speed at which it's spreading and estimate the number of people that are infected. This has made it easier for a large number of samples to be sequenced around the world. By comparison, during the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003, this took almost three months, after the disease was originally blamed on chlamydia.Īdvances in the technology have brought down the cost of gene sequencing significantly and the machines are now small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The virus’s entire genetic makeup, or genome, was published online within days. When the new coronavirus (formally known as SARS-CoV-2) was identified in China in January, scientists around the world were ready to respond.
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