On Jun. 11, 2020, a team of researchers from the National Library of Medicine identified genomic features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and other high-fatality coronaviruses that distinguish them from other members of the coronavirus family.

This research could be a crucial step in helping scientists develop approaches to predict, by genome analysis alone, the severity of future coronavirus disease outbreaks and detect animal coronaviruses that have the potential to infect humans. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.