The Brazilian women who sequenced the genome of the coronavirus

While the average in other countries has been 15 days, Brazilian researchers sequenced the coronavirus genome just two days after the confirmation of the first case of the disease in Brazil. The results were produced by teams from the Adolfo Lutz Institute, which confirmed the diagnosis of a patient on Wednesday (26), and by the universities of São Paulo (USP) and Oxford, in England.

The genome corresponds to all the hereditary information of the virus that is encoded in its DNA. “Afterencise it, we are closer to knowing the origin of the epidemic. We know that the only confirmed case in Brazil came from Italy, however, the Italians still do not know the origin of the outbreak, as they have not yet sequenced their samples. They have no idea who patient zero is and they don’t know if he came directly from China or passed through another country before,” he told Agência Fapesp. Ester Sabinodirector of the Institute of Tropical Medicine (IMT) at USP.

Ester coordinates the Joint Brazil-UK Center for Arbovirus Discovery, Diagnosis, Genomics and Epidemiology (Cadde), which studies arbovirus epidemics, such as dengue and Zika, in real time. According to her, the objective of the work is to produce answers that help health services in diagnostic tests and in the development of vaccines.

Since the first cases in Italy, Ester Sabino’s team has trained researchers to use a sequencing technology known as MinION, which is already used to monitor the evolution of the Zika virus in the Americas.

So the sequencing of the coronavirus genome was conducted by researchers coordinated by Jaqueline Goes de Jesus, postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Medicine of USP and fellow of the development agency FAPESP. She develops research on the mapping of Zika in Brazil. Beside her was Claudio Tavares Sacchi, from the Adolfo Lutz Institute.