In December 2019, the citizens of Wuhan, China were getting sick with what medical professionals thought was a type of viral pneumonia. By January 9, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it was a new coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, that was making the people of Wuhan ill. A few days later, Chinese authorities had sequenced the entire 2019-nCoV genome.
As Sylvie van der Werf, Director of the National Reference Center (CNR) for Respiratory Viruses at the Institut Pasteur explains, “Sequencing the genome of pathogens is crucial for the development of specific diagnostic tests and the identification of potential treatment options.” The Institut Pasteur is responsible for monitoring respiratory viruses in France, and the CNR is one of WHO’s 2019-CoV reference laboratories. On January 29, 2020, the Institut Pasteur’s Mutualized Platform for Microbiology (P2M) was the first European institution to sequence the 2019-CoV genome.
As of January 24, 2020, France had its first three cases of 2019-CoV. P2M was able to sequence 2019-CoV genome in just three days. Vincent Enouf, the Deputy Director of CNR says, “We performed data analysis during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, then corroborated the results on Wednesday with counter analysis.” Enouf continues, “Around twenty other sequences of the novel coronavirus genome have been obtained worldwide, and if we compare them with ours, we can see that they are all very close; there is not much diversity in the viruses analyzed, which suggests that coronavirus 2019-nCoV did not need to mutate in order to adapt and spread.”
Genome sequencing is important because it helps in outbreak detection. Being able to sequence a genome quickly is also important, as it allows scientists to determine the origin of an outbreak and any mutations of the virus, and that helps governments coordinate a proper public health response to the crisis.