Genetic analysis of the coronavirus gives scientists clues about how it’s spreading 

As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, it has mutated in tiny, subtle ways. Those mutations aren’t cause for concern, and so far, don’t appear to be making the virus any more or less dangerous. But scientists can use those slight changes to track the virus from person to person, and location to location. “If we identify a new outbreak cluster in one state, and there’s a question of whether it’s related to a previous cluster or not, the small mutational changes can help you figure out if they’re connected,” says Patrick Boyle, a synthetic biologist at Ginkgo Bioworks.

The coronavirus is made up of around 29,000 building blocks of genetic material called nucleotides. Like other biotechnology companies and labs, Ginkgo has the technology to take a sample of the virus and read out the full sequence of those nucleotides. For the most part, the sequence will be the same in each sample. But the virus makes copies of itself within a human host, and sometimes, it can make mistakes — switching one or two nucleotides out for another.

The version of the virus with those changes can then be passed on when that person infects someone else. Ginkgo is repurposing its systems, which normally don’t sequence viruses, to analyze as many samples of the coronavirus as possible. The goal is to help build out the maps that show how the virus jumped from one person to the next. They’re hoping to scale up to be able to publish the full genetic sequence of 10,000 virus samples a day.

This is awesome. I know groups that currently have samples in need of sequencing. I'll let them know about @Ginkgo's offer. Despite the skyrocketing numbers of COVID-19 cases in the US, only a limited number of virus samples collected in the country have been sequenced in full.

Scientists have more sequences from Washington state than other places. Consequently, they know more about the trajectory of the outbreak in Washington than they know about outbreaks in other states. Some of that genetic data is how Trevor Bedford, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was able to link a case of COVID-19 diagnosed on February 27 in Washington to a case that was diagnosed in late January in the state — indicating that the virus had been circulating locally, and undetected, for that entire time.