Covid-19 - Amateur sleuths on the hunt for variants

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fight against the virus was outlined by heads of government and public health bosses on primetime television. Countries received daily updates based on data analysed by world-leading virologists and academics.

- Linda Geddes

But three years later, the pandemic's trajectory is becoming more difficult to predict - and decision-makers are increasingly reliant on the warnings of a diverse bunch of independent researchers.

This week, Ryan Hisner, a teacher from Indiana in the US, was listed alongside academic co-authors on a paper in Nature, describing how the antiviral drug molnupiravir, used to treat patients with Covid-19, may be fuelling the evolution of new variants by creating a specific set of mutations.

The first of these variants was identified by another amateur virus hunter - Nick Rose, 27, a software engineer from Wisconsin. While it is not clear whether such mutations help the virus to tolerate the drug, the findings may have implications for how antivirals are deployed.

Hisner has no formal education in virology - just a knack for spotting patterns and motivation to wade through reams of genetic data each day.

Experts say such individuals have become a crucial component of global virus surveillance.

Prof T Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, said: "Most of the discovery of new variants, informing the world about them, and characterising them is increasingly being done by a fairly small handful of people who do not necessarily have a formal training in biology."