I was pointed at reference 1 this morning. Seemingly a sophisticated open access database about the genomes of unpleasant diseases. You name it - Zika, Ebola, Mumps, Influenzas - they do it. And not least Coronavirus.
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| The world of coronavirus |
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| The virus in Europe |
I don't suppose I shall ever get to the bottom of it, but I think the coloured dots, colour for country or region, stand for a genome, sampled by someone or other, somewhere or other. Lots of pop-ups when you hover over things giving you lots more gene and mutation flavoured information. Presumably the sort of information you need to be able to say this outbreak A in country B came from country C, in the absence of reliable tracking data about the people involved.
I think the difference between the two is that the top one measures divergence from the first, original virus on the vertical axis, while the bottom one gives the family tree.
On one of the other charts, Nepal seems to be a focus of something, with lots of lines leading out or leading in. Something else to get to the bottom of.
For me at least, an impressive bit of data visualisation. The public spirit is alive and well!
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| The team |
Quite a small team. No idea yet where they came from or how they got together, although I dare say all the information is there if I give it a bit of time.
Reference 1: https://nextstrain.org/. 'Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data. We provide a continually-updated view of publicly available data alongside powerful analytic and visualization tools for use by the community. Our goal is to aid epidemiological understanding and improve outbreak response. If you have any questions, or simply want to say hi ...'.
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