Hacking COVID-19 — Course 3: Unraveling COVID-19's Origins

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. 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 third course will only discuss the multiple sequence alignment and maximum-likelihood phylogenetic inference of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, but future courses in this series will explore follow-up bioinformatics analyses used in the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Week 1
• In Chapter 5, we will use sequence alignment to explore the "Artificial Origin Hypothesis" about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
• Week 2
• In Chapter 6, we will use phylogenetics to explore the "Direct Zoonotic Transfer" and "Intermediate Host" hypotheses about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.