Early transmission patterns of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in travellers from Wuhan to Thailand, January 2020.

We report two cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in travellers from Wuhan, China to Thailand. Both were independent introductions on separate flights, discovered with thermoscanners and confirmed with RT-PCR and genome sequencing. Both cases do not seem directly linked to the Huanan Seafood Market in Hubei but the viral genomes are identical to four other sequences from Wuhan, suggesting early spread within the city already in the first week of January.

South-east Asian Zika virus strain linked to cluster of cases in Singapore, August 2016.

Zika virus (ZIKV) is an ongoing global public health emergency with 70 countries and territories reporting evidence of ZIKV transmission since 2015. On 27 August 2016, Singapore reported its first case of local ZIKV transmission and identified an ongoing cluster. Here, we report the genome sequences of ZIKV strains from two cases and find through phylogenetic analysis that these strains form an earlier branch distinct from the recent large outbreak in the Americas.

Outbreak.info genomic reports: scalable and dynamic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants and mutations.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern has prompted the need for near real-time genomic surveillance to inform public health interventions. In response to this need, the global scientific community, through unprecedented effort, has sequenced and shared over 11 million genomes through GISAID, as of May 2022. This extraordinarily high sampling rate provides a unique opportunity to track the evolution of the virus in near real-time. Here, we present outbreak.info, a platform that currently tracks over 40 million combinations of PANGO lineages and individual mutations, across over 7,000 locations, to provide insights for researchers, public health officials, and the general public. We describe the interpretable and opinionated visualizations in the variant and location focussed reports available in our web application, the pipelines that enable the scalable ingestion of heterogeneous sources of SARS-CoV-2 variant data, and the server infrastructure that enables widespread data dissemination via a high performance API that can be accessed using an R package. We present a case study that illustrates how outbreak.info can be used for genomic surveillance and as a hypothesis generation tool to understand the ongoing pandemic at varying geographic and temporal scales. With an emphasis on scalability, interactivity, interpretability, and reusability, outbreak.info provides a template to enable genomic surveillance at a global and localized scale.

HIV-1 subtype CRF01_AE and B differ in utilization of low levels of CCR5, Maraviroc susceptibility and potential N-glycosylation sites.

HIV subtypes not only predominate in different geographical regions but also differ in key phenotypic characteristics. To determine if genotypic and/or phenotypic differences in the Envelope (Env) glycoprotein can explain subtype related differences, we cloned 37 full length Envs from Subtype B and AE HIV infected individuals from Singapore. Our data demonstrates that CRF01_AE Envs have lower Potential N Glycosylation Sites and higher risk of ×4 development. Phenotypically, CRF01_AE were less infectious than subtype B Envs in cells expressing low levels of CCR5. Moreover, the Maraviroc IC50 was higher for subtype B Envs and correlated with infectivity in low CCR5 expressing cells as well as PNGS. Specifically, the glycosylation site N301 in the V3 loop was seen less frequently in AE subtype and CXCR4 topic viruses. CRF01_AE differs from B subtype in terms of CCR5 usage and Maraviroc susceptibility which may have implications for HIV pathogenesis and virus evolution.