Has China said enough about the coronavirus genome?

• Some scientists have raised concerns about the rate at which Chinese authorities are releasing information
• But international researchers say the virus might not be changing that much and attention should be focused on getting data from all places with outbreaks

When China shared the novel coronavirus genome with the World Health Organisation in the early weeks of the outbreak, the health agency hailed it as a "remarkable achievement".

Understanding the virus's genetic sequence is essential for developing accurate diagnostics and vaccines as well as determining how the virus is changing.

But in recent weeks, questions have been raised in various quarters about how well and how quickly China is sharing this information with the wider world.

The questions surfaced in public earlier this month with two prominent scientists affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wu Chung-I and Pu Muming, leading a call for China's researchers to publish genetic data as soon as possible.

In a letter to China's National Science Review journal, Wu and Pu questioned why there was what they described as a gap in the data, with only older sequences available to researchers as of February 10.

They warned that holding back data could slow down understanding of changes in the transmission patterns as the virus mutates.

"If we can get the virus genome data as quickly as possible, the epidemic situation can be judged more accurately … by comparing the differences in the evolutionary dynamics of the (current virus and severe acute respiratory syndrome)," China Science Daily quoted Wu as saying.

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Those questions were compounded by the closure for "rectification" on January 12 of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre laboratory that published the world's first genome sequence of the coronavirus. The closure came a day after its team published the information.

Nevertheless, when it comes to sharing genetic data for global research, international researchers have defended the information coming out of China in the middle of a public health crisis.

They said that while it was important to have as much data as possible, it played less of a role in the short term if the virus was not changing, as appears to be the case in China.

Gavin Smith, a professor in the programme of emerging infectious diseases at Singapore's Duke-NUS Medical School, said there could be an "overestimation" of the role of the genetic sequence in immediate public health responses to outbreaks.

"You want to get those first genomes out when something happens, but after that (if) there's not a lot of variability, then maybe that's not the priority any more," Smith said, noting that in a public health crisis there are other higher concerns that could slow down the release of new data.

"Where it is useful is for things like vaccines, diagnostics and molecular epidemiology."

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Researchers said that as the crisis appeared to be on the brink of becoming a pandemic, attention now needed to be on keeping an eye out for variations in the virus in different parts of the world rather than just in China.

"Given the spread of the virus and the relatively good control that mainland China has right now over the situation, I think it would actually be more important to get a lot of sequence information from Iran and Italy … and the cases seeded (from those countries)," said Florian Krammer, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Australian virologist Ian Mackay agreed. "As other countries undergo explosive outbreaks or we suddenly find outbreaks that may have been percolating unknown for weeks, it is important to take stock of these genomes," he said.

But like Smith, Mackay said that so far the genetic change did not appear to be a driving factor in this outbreak.

"It is important to keep tabs on a newly circulating virus, although so far this one hasn't thrown up concerning novelties in terms of genetic change, as it's passed from person to person," he said.

Lab that first shared coronavirus sequence closed for 'rectification'

Roy Hall, a professor of microbiology at the University of Queensland, said it was important to have information from all places with an outbreak.

"We still don't know what this virus is going to do … any pattern in any outbreak cluster that can be correlated with a change in the way the virus is behaving can be very useful," Hall said.

"Having that information from the earliest cases in China to most recent human to human cases in other countries, epidemiologists can pick up a pattern of change."

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