Biomedical research PanClinCov is focused on usability of 2nd and 3rd generation sequencing methods in improving clinical management of people infected by SARS-CoV-2 as well as application of these methods to identify genomic variability of SARS-CoV-2.. PanClinCov

Quick raise of novel coronavirus infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 led to global pandemic. By the end of 2020 there were more then 83 million infected people and more than 1.8 million died. Tests based on serological principle, as well as real-time PCR tests does not provide enough sensitivity which leads to high amount of false negative results and it does not provide any information about virus genetic information. Pathogen sequencing has proven to be crucial source of information about its origin, nature, mutation dynamics and efficiency of related vaccines. To date, global database GISAID contains more than 400 thousand records from around the world, including 4 specimens from Slovakia. It has been proven, that virus variability has impact on its infectivity and mortality. There is also an assumption, that human genome variability can influence development and course of illness. The natural starting point for research is to compare the infectivity of the virus against different groups of patients, divided according to the severity of the disease. So called super-spreaders, people without any COVID-19 symptoms and with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 virions for more than 30 days, form a special category which is particularly dangerous for public health. The aim of the research is to identify genetic biomarkers, based on which we can classify a person according to his genotype into a group with a more or less risky course of the disease. As we are currently in a situation where there is a shift from the study of individual genomes to pangenomes (a complete set of all genes for all subspecies of a particular species), the situation will require significant resources to develop bioinformatics tools to work with them. Therefore, it is appropriate to study our hypothesis with variability of the virus genome and host genome for the course of the disease directly at the level of pangenomes.