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Our ability to devise strategies to contain emerging infection outbreaks will depend in part on understanding the evolutionary rate of change in the implicated pathogens. Determining this has been difficult due to limitations in our ability to perform genomic sequencing. However, European researchers have developed a new small portable genome sequencer that was used in Guinea in 2015 and allowed essentially real-time sequencing of viral isolates in the last stages of the West African Ebola virus outbreak.
Between March and October 2015, the researchers were able to sequence 142 Ebola virus samples, with the protocol usually requiring only 2 days from the time of sample collection. The system sequenced single strands of DNA, leading to a high…