Marta Giovanetti, FIOCRUZ - Fundação Oswaldo CruzRio de Janeiro, BRAZIL, speaks on "Portable DNA Sequencing: Impacting the Response to emerging and re-emerging viral pathogens on the ground". This movie has been recorded at ICGEB Trieste.

The recent re-emergencies of Chikungunya (CHIKV), Zika (ZIKV), Yellow Fever (YFV) and dengue (DENV) viruses, as well as the currently emergence of the SARS-CoV-2, have afflicted populations and overwhelmed health systems in many countries. The distribution of those viral pathogens is determined by complex demographic, environmental and social factors, causing diseases to emerge in countries where they were previously unknown. Coupling genomic diagnostics and epidemiology to innovative digital disease detection platforms raises the possibility of an open, global, digital pathogen surveillance system. Real-time sequencing, bioinformatics tools and the combination of genomic and epidemiological data from viral infections can give essential information for understanding the past and the future of an epidemic, making possible to establish an effective surveillance framework on tracking the spread of infections to other geographic regions.