Hacking COVID-19 — Course 5: Tracing SARS-CoV-2's Evolution

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by tracing the evolution 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 fifth course will discuss the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins, and it will cover bioinformatics methods for rooting and dating a phylogenetic tree inferred from SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences.

• Week 1
• In Chapter 7, we will discuss how we can use rooted and dated phylogenetic trees to study the emergence of a virus, with the origins of COVID-19 as our primary inspiration, but with a real case study about HIV transmission as our focus.
• Week 2
• In Chapter 8, we will perform multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic inference, tree rooting, and tree dating to investigate the "Italy First" hypothesis of COVID-19 origins.