Giving Compass' Take:

• Aisling Irwin explains how researchers can more accurately track pandemic mutations through history to create a better picture of the risks that mutations of existing diseases pose. 

• How can funders use this information to direct pandemic prevention efforts? What further research is needed in this area? 

• Learn why the U.S. is not ready for the next pandemic. 

Portraits of the evolution of some of history’s deadliest pandemics have been created through analysis of thousands of skeletons and new collections of historical photographs - and the results could indicate how similar diseases may evolve in the future.

They have been able to calculate each disease’s mutation rate. The faster this is, the more rapidly the bug can potentially adapt to the environment around it. Leprosy, for example, turns out to have mutated only 20 times in the last thousand years, putting it at low risk of the type of changes which would make it more infectious or antibiotic resistant.

Before this, people just inferred the past from modern-day genomes but all those papers have been wrong by at least a factor of 10.

Tuberculosis, on the other hand, has mutated about 200 times in the same period – much faster than was previously thought.

The team transformed the laborious process of pinpointing the right DNA by inventing algorithms which take advantage of the increased computing power that has become available in recent years.

The big advantage of his team’s algorithm – known as MALT – is speed. It can examine one billion DNA fragments in 24 hours and identify which organism each one comes from.

Read the full article on tracking pandemics by Aisling Irwin at The Naked Scientists.