Today, Ensembl has joined the international scientific effort to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which has spread rapidly since emerging in late 2019. Our SARS-CoV-2 genome browser and related resources at covid-19.ensembl.org are intended to support both basic research and ongoing work to develop treatments, diagnostics and vaccines.

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The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic presents a serious challenge to healthcare, economies and societies across the globe, one that has demanded an unprecedented scientific response. Projects across multiple disciplines are now re-directing their usual analytical efforts to meet this challenge head-on, and GENCODE are no exception. Our project produces human gene annotation, and we’re contributing to this scientific effort by re-examining human genes that may be relevant to viral infection and COVID-19 disease. We hope this work will support further research along these lines. For example, updated gene annotation could benefit studies to find disease-linked variants in patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms, including work by Genomics England and others.

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