과학자들 바이러스의 게놈을 분석, 코로나19사태 해결에 돌파구 모색에 나서 【 2020년 02월 24일 월요일자 코리아헤럴드 】
By decoding virus genome, scientists seek upper hand against COVID-19
By Mellssa Healy
Los Angeles Times
The genetic code of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is only about 30,000 chracters long, but what a story it tells. Those nucletides conceal secrets of the virus' past, including it's origins, its passage to distant ports. They signal how long it has been at large and whether it can hide by infecting people who show no outward signs of illness. And they can point the way to medicines, vaccines and public health strategies that might bring a runaway crisis under control.
Unlocking all of that requires a combination of teamwork and technology that didn't exist when the SARS epidemic broke out nearly 20 years ago. But today when a deadly virus explodes out of nowhere, geneticists are indispensable players in the international game of whodunit.
" Now we can really get a much fuller version of that puzzle," said Dr.Liliana Brown, who directs the office of genomics and advanced technology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases.
For much of the 20th century, the central technique of germ-hunting has been a labor-intensive process called contact tracing. It starts with a search for the person or people who were the first to be infected. Then the search expands to the people those initial patents interacted with, then the ones they interacted with, and so on.
With luck, the result is a time-stamped map of the germ's spread that includes every case of illness, death and recovery. These investigations provide inferences and insights about how a pathogen spreads, how deadly it is, and what measures-including quarantines, school closures and travel restrictions - could slow its transmission.
Yet contact tracing is an imperfect process that relies on people's memories, their candor, and an absense of chance encounters with strangers. With genomics, scientists can follow the progression of mutations from patient to patient and establish relatedness among them.
That can fill in gaps left by memory lapses ro concealment. It can even flag new and worrisome means of transmission between distant strangers - through vents or pipes linking apartments, for instance, or by airporne particles that linger longer than expected.
" Genomics has completely transformed our abililty to track viruses and understand their spread," said Kristian Anderson, a pioneer in this emerging field who is based at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla. " We're gaining insights not previously possible."