Bette Korber Publishes Report on NIH Prioritization of SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Bette Korber Publishes Report on NIH Prioritization of SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Bette Korber, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the New Mexico Consortium, recently published an online report titled, US National Institutes of Health Prioritization of SARS-CoV-2 Variants, with the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.

In an effort to overcome and stay on top of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) SARS-CoV-2 Assessment of Viral Evolution (SAVE) Detection Group regularly prioritizes SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The main goal of prioritizing SARS-CoV-2 variants is to identify applicable lineages for phenotypic testing by experimental groups within the NIH SAVE network by integrating up-to-date epidemiologic, structural, and genetic information.

Since late 2020, SARS-CoV-2 variants have regularly emerged with competitive and phenotypic differences from previously circulating strains, sometimes with the potential to escape from immunity produced by prior exposure and infection.

Using bioinformatic methods to monitor the emergence, spread, and potential phenotypic properties of emerging and circulating strains, the Early Detection group group has been able to identify the most relevant variants for  groups within the program to phenotypically characterize.

Since April 2021, the group has prioritized variants monthly, and has been able to rapidly identify most major variants of SARS-CoV-2. Access to regularly updated information on the recent evolution and epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 has been provided to experimental groups within the National Institutes of Health program. The prioritizations have been quite useful to experimental collaborators, and have helped them identify adaptive and threatening variations, which are important to study.

The NIH SAVE group publishes monthly lineage prioritizations for use by experimental collaborators.

To read the entire report, see: US National Institutes of Health Prioritization of SARS-CoV-2 Variants

The illustration at the top of the page is created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses.