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To Respond To a Disease Outbreak, Bring In the Portable Genome Sequencers

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: February 4th, 2016, 1:00pm UTC

the_newsbeagle writes: Epidemiologists working on Zika virus could benefit from portable genome sequencers, like these used during the Ebola outbreak. In spring 2015, researchers conducted the first experiment in real-time genetic surveillance during an infectious disease epidemic. The researchers packed all their equipment in a couple of suitcases and set up a mobile lab in Guinea, where they used palm-sized sequencing devices to analyze viral RNA from 142 patients. Genomic data can illuminate the chains of transmission in an outbreak, and can help scientists develop diagnostics and vaccines.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=To+Respond+To+a+Disease+Outbreak%2C+Bring+In+the+Portable+Genome+Sequencers%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F20bQhTr"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhardware.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F16%2F02%2F04%2F1610205%2Fto-respond-to-a-disease-outbreak-bring-in-the-portable-genome-sequencers%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/02/04/1610205/to-respond-to-a-disease-outbreak-bring-in-the-portable-genome-sequencers?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/02/04/1610205/to-respond-to-a-disease-outbreak-bring-in-the-portable-genome-sequencers?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/3LGMH3aFmgU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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