Ewan Birney

Ewan Birney is Deputy Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and a Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), He tweets at @EwanBirney, from which this article was adapted.

The new strain of Sars-CoV-2: what we know

What do we know about the new Covid strain? Like all viruses, Sars-CoV-2 changes. Like a manuscript that is being endlessly copied, letter by letter, it accumulates typos – changes in its genetic code. Compared with other viruses, this one changes at quite a slow rate.  But we have seen a new version of the virus’s