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Dr. Erich Jarvis, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, professor at The Rockefeller University and head of the Vertebrate Genome Project (VGP), discusses an interesting difference between hospitalized patients and controls where the severely ill show more variation in a part of the Interferon Alpha and Beta Receptor Subunit 1 gene, a key part of the interferon pathway that regulates immune response. Dr. Jarvis is using Saphyr and the pipeline he developed for the VGP to build reference quality genomes of patients and controls and will compare them with each other and with animal species that are sensitive to infection with SARS-CoV-2 or not, as previously reported.