Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2022 May 20:823:146387.
doi: 10.1016/j.gene.2022.146387. Epub 2022 Mar 4.

Role of genomics in combating COVID-19 pandemic

K A Saravanan  1 , Manjit Panigrahi  2 , Harshit Kumar  1 , Divya Rajawat  1 , Sonali Sonejita Nayak  1 , Bharat Bhushan  1 , Triveni Dutt  3
Affiliations
Review

Role of genomics in combating COVID-19 pandemic

K A Saravanan et al. Gene. .

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) quickly swept over the world, becoming one of the most devastating outbreaks in human history. Being the first pandemic in the post-genomic era, advancements in genomics contributed significantly to scientific understanding and public health response to COVID-19. Genomic technologies have been employed by researchers all over the world to better understand the biology of SARS-CoV-2 and its origin, genomic diversity, and evolution. Worldwide genomic resources have greatly aided in the investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has ushered in a new era of genomic surveillance, wherein scientists are tracking the changes of the SARS-CoV-2 genome in real-time at the international and national levels. Availability of genomic and proteomic information enables the rapid development of molecular diagnostics and therapeutics. The advent of high-throughput sequencing and genome editing technologies led to the development of modern vaccines. We briefly discuss the impact of genomics in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in this review.

Keywords: COVID-19; Genomic surveillance; Genomics; Reverse vaccinology; SARS-CoV-2.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

None
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
A summary of various roles of genomics in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Timeline of key events of COVID-19 and genomics, starting from the first report in December 2019 to the current situation as of December 2021.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Abbott T.R., Dhamdhere G., Liu Y., Lin X., Goudy L., Zeng L., et al. Development of CRISPR as an Antiviral Strategy to Combat SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza. Cell. 2020;181:865–876.e12. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.020. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Al Kaabi N., Zhang Y., Xia S., Yang Y., Al Qahtani M.M., et al. Effect of 2 Inactivated SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines on Symptomatic COVID-19 Infection in Adults. JAMA. 2021;326:35. doi: 10.1001/jama.2021.8565. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Almofti Y.A., Abd-elrahman K.A., Eltilib E.E.M. Vaccinomic approach for novel multi epitopes vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) BMC Immunol. 2021;22 doi: 10.1186/s12865-021-00412-0. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Alter G., Yu J., Liu J., Chandrashekar A., Borducchi E.N., Tostanoski L.H., et al. Immunogenicity of Ad26.COV2.S vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 variants in humans. Nature. 2021;596:268–272. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03681-2. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Andersen K.G., Rambaut A., Lipkin W.I., Holmes E.C., Garry R.F. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat. Med. 2020;26:450–452. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9. - DOI - PMC - PubMed