Lying in bed on the night of 10 January, scrolling through news on his smartphone, Andrew Mesecar got an alert. He sat up. It was here. The complete genome of a coronavirus causing a cluster of pneumonia-like cases in Wuhan, China, had just been posted online.
Around the world, similar notifications appeared on the devices of scientists who first crossed swords with coronaviruses in the 2003 outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and then again with MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012. Instantly, the researchers mobilized against a new adversary. “We always knew that this was going to come back,” says Mesecar, head of biochemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. “It’s what history has shown us.”
In Lübeck, Germany, Rolf Hilgenfeld stopped packing boxes for his retirement and started preparing buffers for crystallography. In Minnesota, Fang Li stayed up all night analysing the new genome and drafting a manuscript. In Shanghai, China, Haitao Yang rallied a dozen graduate students to clear their schedules. In Texas, Jason McLellan instructed laboratory members to start assembling gene sequences from the viral genome…
