February 10, 2021 | Aaron Groff | KION
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION) Russ Corbett-Detig is a UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute affiliate. They’re helping the global effort of tracking the mutating virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve written the software package that does this fast evolutionary relationship building, but we also a web browser portal that we designed where any group that makes a genome sequence can upload it and we’ll actually tell you what it is related to on the tree, kind of where it lives in this evolutionary history of the virus, and so you can use that information to figure out ‘ok, what is the strain and what are the specific variants here that we know about,” he tells KION.
The Genomics Institute also created a genome browser to organize and visualize the genomic information.
Corbett-Detig says he won’t be happy until every positive case is being sequenced, and as of a couple weeks ago, the U.S. was behind.