Ebola virus mutating rapidly as it spreads
On 24 May, Augustine Goba received a blood sample from a pregnant woman in Sierra Leone who had fallen ill after attending the funeral of an Ebola victim in Guinea. Twenty-four hours later, the test results came back positive. Goba, who directs a diagnostic lab at Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, had confirmed the country's first case of Ebola.
He and his colleagues have now decoded the genetic sequences of 99 Ebola viruses collected from 78 patients during the first 24 days of the epidemic in Sierra Leone. The work1, published online in Science, could help to inform the design of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, says structural biologist Erica Ollmann Saphire of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “This paper is terrific,” she adds.
The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has already killed more than 1,400 people — including five of Goba's co-authors from Kenema. The paper is dedicated to their memory.
The sequence data, which were made publicly available by 31 July, constitute the largest collection of genetic information on Ebola ever to be released. To get them, the group collected leftover blood from samples taken for diagnostic tests in Kenema. They then used a chemical solution to deactivate the Ebola viruses, and sent the samples to be sequenced at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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http://www.nature.com/news/ebola-virus-mutating-rapidly-as-it-spreads-1.15777?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews