Neville Sanjana, PhD, Core Faculty Member at the New York Genome Center, Assistant Professor of Biology, New York University, and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, is among the scientists weighing in on What We Learned About Genetic Sequencing During COVID-19 Could Revolutionize Public Health, a feature article by Time health and medicine national correspondent Alice Park.
Park refers to the Sanjana Lab’s research study into SARS-CoV-2’s first major genetic morphing, which experts dubbed D614G. “This first variant that spread quickly in early to mid-2020 was just a random mutation—these happen by chance all the time,” notes Dr. Sanjana in the article. “Now it’s virtually impossible to get COVID-19 without getting this mutation, so we’ve seen how natural selection and evolution can take a new mutation and bring it to dominance in a population.”
In the third paragraph of her article, Park stresses the importance of ongoing SARS-CoV-2 surveillance:
“One of the most powerful ways of fighting a pandemic caused by a never-before-seen virus is by decoding the microbial culprit’s genome. And doing so can, and should, be the top priority of public-health efforts going forward, so scientists can expose how the microbe works, to guide, in real time, the best ways for controlling and ultimately snuffing it out.”
Current and past CDC officials, the CEO of Illumina, and scientists from Columbia University, Purdue University, and other institutions were among those interviewed, along with Dr. Sanjana, for this feature.
The Time article was also syndicated nationally, most notably in Yahoo News.
