Genome sequencing has become a household term during this pandemic. This week, we explore how it became an important tool in the fight against Covid-19.

We've become familiar with a whole suite of words and their meanings over the last three years of this pandemic - coronavirus, variant of concern, mutation. There is one term in particular that many of us probably wouldn't have come across as part of our daily lives before: genome sequencing.

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It wasn't all that long ago that genome sequencing of a whole virus genome was expensive, laborious and time consuming.

But rapid advancements in genome sequencing technology in the last decade have reduced the cost and effort involved. So, when a new disease emerged in late 2019, the technology was ready to be used in a new way, says Dr Jemma Geoghegan, a virologist at the University of Otago and ESR. "It completely revolutionised genomics. I mean, never before has real-time genomics been integrated at the level it is at the moment with disease outbreak," she says.

Jemma is part of a team of scientists at ESR, the Institute of Environmental and Science Research, that did early work on sequencing the Covid-19-positive cases that arrived in New Zealand. From there, they made a case for this type of real-time sequencing work to be integrated into New Zealand's pandemic response, to help guide decision making.

The extent to which genome sequencing was used here in the early days of the pandemic meant that Aotearoa could do investigations that other countries simply weren't able to undertake. According to Dr Joep de Ligt, Bioinformatics and Genomics Lead at ESR, "That actually has meant that we could do some fairly unique studies of actually showing airborne transmission during flights and in quarantine facilities.

"And they were the type of studies that were quite important to the recognition of the airborne nature of the virus," he adds.

In this Our Changing World episode, we learn how New Zealand's genome sequencing efforts added to global knowledge of the virus, and explore the past, present, and future of genome sequencing technology.

To learn more:

Dr Jemma Geoghegan's research into virus evolution was the focus of the episode Investigating the virosphere

The Detail podcast have an episode about filling in the final pieces of the human genome puzzle

If you want to learn more about DNA, genes, RNA and gene expression, listen to A new way to make vaccines

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details