Study focuses on new tool that enables easy, effective disease tracking

A new open source, a cloud-based tool called IDseq makes it possible to rapidly detect, identify, and track emerging pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2.

This tool can identify pathogens before there is an available complete genome sequence; thus, it can be used for current infectious disease outbreaks and also for emerging ones.

This will substantially aid in preventing future pandemics.

The study was published in the journalGigaScience.

The coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the importance of global infectious disease monitoring.

Finding the cause of an infectious disease outbreak is challenging, especially if it stems from a previously unknown pathogen.

IDseq, an open-source, cloud-based metagenomic analysis platform, identifies both novel and existing disease-causing pathogens from a given sample - be it a human, animal, or parasite - to provide an actionable report of what is happening on the ground in labs and clinics anywhere in the world.

The new user-friendly IDseq software is open source and freely available to the global health community, reducing the barrier of entry to metagenomics.