Neher

“GISAID moved fast,” says Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel, “and they made it easy to get the data in.”

“GISAID basically said: Email us the data and we’ll take care of it,” Neher says.

Nextstrain founders Neher and Trevor Bedford, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, responded that they thought they had complied with GISAID’s rules but would be “happy” to give credit more generously.

“Now things have shifted with the massive degree of immunity that people have against previous variants,” said Cornelius Roemer, a computational biologist in Richard Neher’s group at the University of Basel.

“Handling these genomes is more complex than the RNA viruses,” says Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel.