On Apr. 8, 2020, TGen, an affiliate of City of Hope, The Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona University, and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona announced they had formed a union dedicated to tracking the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Harnessing the power of state-of-the-art technology and ‘big data’ analysis, researchers at the newly formed Arizona COVID-19 Genomics Union want to better understand how this virus may be evolving, how it is transmitted, and how it is moving through the general population. This molecular epidemiological approach combines traditional epidemiology methods with evolutionary modeling based upon high-resolution analysis of the virus’ genome.