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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Tue Apr 28, 2020, 04:29 AM Apr 2020

Making sense of the viral multiverse

APRIL 28, 2020

by Richard Harth, Arizona State University

In November of 2019—likely, even earlier—a tiny entity measuring just a few hundred billionths of a meter in diameter began to tear apart human society on a global scale. Within a few months, the relentless voyager known as SARS-CoV-2 had made its way to every populated corner of the earth, leaving scientists and health authorities with too many questions and few answers.

Today, researchers are scrambling to understand where and how the novel coronavirus arose, what features account for the puzzling constellation of symptoms it can cause and how the wildfire of transmission may be brought under control. An important part of this quest will involve efforts to properly classify this emergent human pathogen and to understand how it relates to other viruses we may know more about.

In a consensus statement, Arvind Varsani, a molecular virologist with ASU's Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics and a host of international collaborators propose a new classification system, capable of situating coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 within the enormous web of viruses across the planet, known as the virosphere.

In order to adequately categorize this astonishing viral diversity, the group proposes a 15-rank classification scheme and describe how three human pathogens—severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS CoV), Ebola virus, and herpes simplex virus 1, fit into the new framework.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-viral-multiverse.html

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