Emma Carroll, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Southern right wales have been hunted to near extinction. Now their genome has been sequenced to help biologists track their recovery and understand the impacts of climate change, past and future.
From a global cattle disease that can devastate herds to water-borne pathogens causing severe food poisoning, genome sequencing has become an important tool in the control of infectious diseases.
We believe New Zealand can eliminate COVID-19 again. But it could do more to speed up that process with mandatory masks and tighter controls on high-risk venues, including bars, gyms and churches.
Today smallpox can only be found in deep freeze inside a few highly secured laboratories, like this one at the CDC in 1980.
CDC
The smallpox virus appears to have been with humanity for millennia before a global vaccination drive wiped it out. Current genome research suggests how smallpox spread and where it came from.
The variation captured in these genomes, when compared to genomes sampled elsewhere, provides a fingerprint that might be associated with a particular virus and a particular cluster of transmission.
Scientists hope to learn what makes certain red squirrels able to survive squirrelpox.
Through public genome sequences, a team in Berlin perfected a molecular diagnostic protocol to detect the 2019-nCoV more than a week before the first case was confirmed in Germany.
Shutterstock
Frontier research initiatives to tackle the 2019 coronavirus seem to be dominated by institutions in China, the US, Japan and labs across Europe. Very little seem to be coming form Indonesia.
A landmark analysis of the genetic sequences of hundreds of different cancers offers crucial insights into the origins and growth of the disease’s myriad forms.
Africa is known to be where humans originated. This makes it the most genetically diverse region in the world. Diversity in other populations represents a subset of the diversity within Africa.
Sennedjem and Iineferti in the Fields of Iar, 1295–1213BC.
Charles K. Wilkinson/Met Museum of Art
The koala genome, published today, gives us new and valuable information to aid conservation of this marsupial. It identifies special genes that evolved to adapt the koala to its unique lifestyle.
The Canada 150 Sequencing Initiative will sequence the genomes of 150 organisms important to Canadians, publishing the results in public databases.
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Research Professor and DST/NRF SARChI Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics, National Institute for Communicable Diseases, CAPRISA Research Associate, University of the Witwatersrand