NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

SARS-CoV-2 Detection in Sequence Read Archive Data

Investigator: Patrick Chain
Affiliation: Los Alamos National Laboratory

This project is looking for signatures of SARS-CoV-2 in a large repository of genomics data to better track the temporal and spatial spread of the virus. The past six months of data are being scanned to better understand the background levels in the environment.

Data is coming from the Sequence Read Archive, a database of genomics data from the next generation of sequencing platforms, maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

The team from Los Alamos National Lab develops bioinformatics tools that have been deployed in a data-intensive computing environment and have been recognized with an R&D 100 Award.


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.