New tool to speed up growth of the COVID-19 genomic sequencing tree

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-05-11 01:00

Australia; International; ACT

Genomic sequencing has grown to play a significant role in tracing the spread of COVID-19, as contact tracers look at viral genomes to link cases to one another and track virus spread. With nearly 100,000 sequences made public by the end of September 2020, the size of COVID-19's genomic tree is making it increasingly difficult to add more sequences in a timely manner. International and Australian researchers have therefore developed a new sequencing tool which appears to increase the speed of placing new sequences on the tree, allowing sequencing to keep up with contact tracing needs.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Genetics

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The Australian National University

Funder: generated and shared via GISAID, on which this research is based. During this work, Y.T is funded through Schmidt Futures Foundation SF 857 and NIH grant 5R01HG010485. B.T. and R.C.-D. were supported by grant no. R35GM128932 and by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship to R.C.-D. B.T. was funded by grant nos. T32HG008345 and F31HG010584. The UCSC Human Genome Browser software, quality control, and training is funded by National Human Genome Research Institute, currently with grant no. 5U41HG002371-19. The SARS-CoV-2 genome browser and data annotation tracks are funded by generous individual donors including P. and R. Rebele, E. and W. Schmidt by recommendation of the Schmidt Futures program, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (no. 2020-0000000020) and a University of California Office of the President Emergency COVID-19 Research Seed Funding Grant no. R00RG2456. N.D.M. is funded by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. R.L. is funded by an Australian Research Council grant no. DP200103151 and by a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant.

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