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Between jobs when the COVID virus struck, a biologist teamed up with his supercomputer-expert buddy to browse through the 16 petabytes of genomic sequence data that had been uploaded to the cloud by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Sixteen petabytes of computer space is a lot—1015 bytes, enough to store a digital file of each of the more than 332 million people who live in the U.S.
These particular files contain genomic sequences gathered from everything from farm soils to tropical fish to the insides of human intestines.
Rummaging through the files, the pair wanted to see what other coronaviruses might be lurking undiscovered in the world around us.
They not only found nine that hadn’t been seen before, but also about 132,000 other RNA viruses previously unknown to science, including 30 related to hepatitis Delta, which causes liver failure, and giant viruses that were in both the samples taken from a Bangladeshi man and dogs and cats in Britain.
To sift through the raw data, the pair devised software that carried out the scans faster than had been previously possible, rifling through a million genomes a day at a cost of less than a cent each.
The group, which gathered several expert collaborators along the way, has made their tools and data available publicly.
The world’s collection of genomes and DNA data is expanding so fast that, by the end of the decade, 100 million new viruses could be identified, the researchers said.
TRENDPOST: Viruses are the family of pathogens that we know the least about. This foundational work gives medical science an entire library of new viruses as well as information that can tell researchers whether they’re benign or dangerous, what kinds of illnesses they might cause, and how they could be counteracted.
The tools and newfound genomes will enable researchers to design vaccines for coronaviruses that have yet to cause human sickness, as well as treatments for previously unknown viruses causing a spectrum of illnesses and conditions.
More broadly, the tools and data can help virologists match these newly discovered viruses to human ailments, understand how viruses evolve, which are related, and how they might leap from animals to humans.