Tracing Transmission (Science During a Pandemic #4), with Dr. Samantha Lycett

Not Another Science Podcast

The SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19) pandemic swept around the world in a frighteningly short amount of time. With each news update, the number of affected regions, the number of cases, and the number of deaths climbed. In such a frantic situation, where the virus was seemingly everywhere, how do you determine how the disease spread through populations and across the world?

This is where researchers like Dr. Samantha Lycett come in. Since the start of the pandemic, scientists have been collecting and cataloguing samples of SARS-Cov-2, sequencing their genetic information, and publishing it with open access. Dr. Lycett has been using the sequences of different SARS-Cov-2 genomes published online to trace the evolution of the virus, and to help establish how it was transmitted across the world. Comparing the genomes allows her to find mutations within the sequences, which she can use to establish the order in which the mutations appeared and thus, how the virus travelled through different populations.

You can find out more about Dr. Lycett and her work on her lab’s website, and her University of Edinburgh staff page.

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