How Zika arrived and spread in Florida

Drs Andersen and Grubaugh hope these lessons from the 2016 epidemic will help researchers and health officials respond even faster to prevent Zika’s spread in 2017.

Behind the data

Understanding Zika’s timeline required an international team of researchers and partnerships with several health agencies.

The researchers also designed a new method of genomic sequencing just to study the Zika virus. Because Zika is hard to collect in the blood of those infected, it was a challenge for the researchers to isolate enough of its genetic material for sequencing.

To solve this problem, the researchers developed 2 different protocols to break apart the genetic material they could find and reassemble it in a useful way for analysis.

With these new protocols, the researchers sequenced the virus from 28 of the reported 256 Zika cases in Florida, as well as 7 mosquito pools, to model what happened in the larger patient group.

As they worked, the researchers released their data immediately publicly to help other researchers. They hope to release more data—and analysis—in real time as cases mount in 2017.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Ray Thomas Foundation, a Mahan Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Computational Biology Program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Union Seventh Framework Programme, the United States Agency for International Development Emerging Pandemic Threats Program-2 PREDICT-2, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.