Hacking COVID-19 — Course 2: Decoding SARS-CoV-2's Secrets

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by annotating the SARS-CoV-2 genome and using the annotation to design a COVID-19 diagnostic test. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you! As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity. This second course will only discuss the annotation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, but future courses in this series will explore follow-up bioinformatics analyses used in the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Week 1
• In Chapter 3, we will explore how to use bioinformatics to aid in rapidly diagnosing patients who may be infected with COVID-19. Much like how laboratories around the world have been hard at work developing methods to test for COVID-19, we will now try to design our own diagnostic test.
• Week 2
• In Chapter 4, we will use the SARS-CoV-2 genome annotation to design our own COVID-19 diagnostic test and will learn how to measure its accuracy.