📜1/
I want to thank Rafa López 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇪🇸🇮🇱 very much for giving me the opportunity to talk (here: ahttps://www.epe.es/es/sanidad/20221212/cazador-variantes-secuencia-domina-espana-79847907) a bit about how everything started on variant hunting side:

2/ from the heroic period after arambaut Oliver Pybus and Áine O'Toole created the SC2 ' PANGO 'nomenklature ' and Aine unbelievable work to designate quite everything between B.1. and B.1.617 and B.1.1 and B.1.1.519

3/ then the decision to open up things letting everyone, scientist or citizen, the chance to propose a lineage spotted, discovered or sequenced via Pango github page and that was the winning choice during the VOCs Era , the ones you all know as Alpha Beta Gamma and..

4/ ..and the ones you never heard about as B.1.1.318 or P.6 or C.1.2 or B.1.637 B.1.638.
I still remember that morning i read Bani Jolly proposal of what would have to turn to Delta the deadliest lineage.
I called gianluca c 🏴‍☠️🇻🇪 #MaskUp #noGBD #Truce Alfiere to tell him 'Gian something is happening in India'

5/Then the other turning point when already Delta had won every other variant was when Cornelius Roemer had a intuition: no one alone would have been able to catch the virus and the virus was running , country after country were affected by virulent waves of Delta

6/ So what did Cornelius Roemer ? took people who were already active on the pango github page and tried to get the best out of them. With a zoom call a saturday afternoon in september the core of the variant hunting group was made Josette, Zach,' Saka', Shay, Sam, Gian

7/ First people to join after that call was Tom Peacock and day after day month after month lineage after lineage our group grew in numbers and skills while also the tools we had were growing with us

8/ We could not have done a lot without Chaoran Chen behind GenSpectrum or without Nextclade with Ivan Aksamentov and Cornelius Roemer or the Nextstrain build maintained by Richard Neher or Dr Emma Hodcroft or without Usher tree maintained by Angie Hinrichs and colleagues

9/we grew in numbers both on the scientist side where we have been joined by Etienne Simon-Loriere Scott V. Nguyen, PhD @LenaSchimmel (creator of SC2RF , first tool for SC2recombinant!) Yunlong Richard Cao Matthijs Welkers Bert Mulder Fanchong Jian Fabrizio Chiodo Raj Rajnarayanan Rodrigo Quiroga 🔬 Manlio De Domenico