Masatoshi Nei, Evan Pugh University Professor Emeritus at Penn State, a pioneering evolutionary geneticist and a laureate of the prestigious Kyoto Prize, has died at age 92. His extraordinary life was marked by transformative contributions to evolutionary genetics and biology.
Dengue is the fastest spreading arboviral disease, posing great challenges on global public health. A reproduceable and comparable global genotyping framework for contextualizing spatiotemporal epidemiological data of dengue virus (DENV) is essential for research studies and collaborative surveillance. Targeting DENV-1 spreading prominently in recent decades, by reconciling all qualified complete E gene sequences of 5003 DENV-1 strains with epidemiological information from 78 epidemic countries/areas ranging from 1944 to 2018, we established and characterized a unified global high-resolution genotyping framework using phylogenetics, population genetics, phylogeography, and phylodynamics. The defined framework was discriminated with three hierarchical layers of genotype, subgenotype and clade with respective mean pairwise distances 2–6%, 0.8–2%, and ≤ 0.8%. The global epidemic patterns of DENV-1 showed strong geographic constraints representing stratified spatial
On the origin of this species
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A search is on for ‘patient zero’ the first ever case of Covid-19 as a team of genetic sleuths attempts to trace the mutation history of the deadly SARS-CoV2 virus
The novel coronavirus, which has caused untold miseries in almost every country in the world over the last one and a half years, is still shrouded in many mysteries. Even after nearly 15.7 crore cases and around 32.7 lakh deaths, scientists are still in the dark about the emergence of the very first case of human transmission.
Identifying the very first case what scientists call ‘patient zero’ is key to ascertaining how the virus SARS-CoV2 acquired the ability to infect humans. Besides, it can help draw up the evolutionary history of the virus, which has brought the world economy on its knees in a short span of time.