By Nelson Veilleux
A lot of people refer to the coronavirus as the “bug.” The more correct phrase would be “bugs.”
At present, health officials say, there are at least eight strains of the coronavirus wreaking havoc across the world.
As of today, in excess of 2,000 genetic sequences of the virus have been brought to research centers and the open database called NextStrain. What that means, doctors are saying, is that the virus is undergoing mutation in real time.
According to
nextstrain.org/ncov, samples from almost every continent – the exception is Antarctica – indicated that the mutation is taking place every 15 days, according to National Geographic.
“These mutations are completely benign and useful as a puzzle piece to uncover how the virus is spreading,” Nextstrain cofounder Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told the periodical. “If we go back to the Ebola virus five years ago, it was a year-long process from samples being collected to genomes being sequenced and shared publicly,” Bedford says. “Now the turnaround is much faster—from two days to a week—and that real-time ability to use these techniques in a way that impacts the outbreak is new.”
“This genetics-first approach to tracking the coronavirus has emerged as a bright spot among the barrage of devastating pandemic headlines,” National Geographic reported. “Similar science was instrumental in decoding previous epidemics, such as Zika and Ebola. But experts say the declining cost and increased speed and efficiency of genetic sequencing tools has made it possible for a small army of researchers around the world to document the coronavirus’s destructive path even faster. Those insights can help officials choose whether to shift from containment to mitigation strategies, especially in places where testing has lagged.”
Charles Chiu, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, said that the database also provides insight into how the virus is moving throughout the US, according to USA Today. “The outbreaks are trackable,” Chiu said. “We have the ability to do genomic sequencing almost in real-time to see what strains or lineages are circulating.”
“Remember, we’re seeing a very small glimpse into the much larger pandemic,” Kristian Andersen, a professor at Scripps Research, told USA Today. “We have half a million described cases right now but maybe 1,000 genomes sequenced. So there are a lot of lineages we’re missing.”