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  • WHERE I WORK

Staring into the human genome to diagnose COVID

Bioinformatician Lucía Spangenberg is helping to make genetic sequencing available to anyone who needs it.
  1. Patricia Maia Noronha

    1. Patricia Maia Noronha is a freelance writer in Lisbon.

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Lucía Spangenberg uses the Mk1c Sequencer to determine the DNA sequence of an organism or portions of the human genome.

Lucía Spangenberg is a bioinformatician affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo in Uruguay and co-founder of the company GenLives. She is also a teacher at the Catholic University of Uruguay. Credit: Pablo Albarenga for Nature

In this picture I’m using a MinION Mk1C, a portable, cheap and easy-to-use DNA-sequencing machine, to detect SARS-CoV-2 in a nasal swab. This is part of the work the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo is doing to combat coronavirus in Uruguay. Our team has been analysing DNA samples from all over the country to detect clusters of the virus and its variants.

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Nature 603, 354 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00654-x

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