Abstract—Next-generation sequencing (NGS), with Illumina sequencing being the most well-known and most widely used NGS platform, is a high-throughput DNA (or RNA) sequencing technology that allows massive parallel sequencing. There are numerous applications of NGS, with some of them being related to the pandemics or epidemics caused by viral infection, and an example of that is the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is a pandemic that began in December 2019 caused by a novel coronavirus—the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This review then focuses on the discussion of how NGS technology has been applied to the study of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the review describes the applications of NGS in whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2, identification of novel COVID-19 viral mutations, tracking the variant viral lineages, and providing insights into the origin and transmission pattern of the current pandemic.


Index Terms— Next-generation sequencing, Illumina sequencing, COVID-19, novel virus identification, viral variant, transmission pattern.


Jiahuan He is with McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Cite: Jiahuan He, "Next-Generation Sequencing on COVID-19 Pandemic," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 30-38, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).