Viral sequencing vital for ending pandemics

As the tallies of COVID-19’s effects in the United States grew, School of Medicine and Public Health researchers, along with others in UW-Madison’s AIDS Vaccine Research Laboratory, were sequencing the genomes of as many virus samples as they could process and reading each letter of the viruses’ genetic codes. Then they were posting surveillance results online. Their tracking, made possible in part through funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program, helped them understand how COVID-19 and other viruses circulate. They hope to inspire the building of a coordinated sequencing system in the U.S., which could help end this pandemic and the next.

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