Biologists recreate the coronavirus from its DNA code

At our request, Battelle, a scientific R&D company whose software ThreatSEQ can make those comparisons, ran the scenario of someone trying to order a copy of SARS-CoV-2. According to Craig Bartling, a senior research scientist at Battelle, the software flagged both the entire virus, and most of its genes individually, “at the highest threat level.” Bartling says the alerts went off because the virus is highly similar to the original SARS, a related virus that sparked a global outbreak starting in 2002.