The Pantograph Project began in 2019 with the mission to provide a next generation tool for unlocking population genetic information for researchers. Pantograph is an open source browsable pangenome visualization for graph genomes. It scales to thousands of individuals while preserving all types of sequence variation. Other tools either are not scalable or discard all genome rearrangements.
In March 2020 we realized that Pantograph could make a significant contribution to the work being done by researchers and vaccine developers in the global fight against SARS-Cov-2. Pantograph’s application to the COVID-19 pandemic is driven by the unique evolutionary scenario we are facing. The infected population size is a multiplier for the number of mutations available for selection. Pantograph can help predict vaccine effectiveness in different regions of the world by integrating our total knowledge of genetic diversity.
Our team participated in the COVID-19 Virtual Biohackathon 2020 held in April. We made an open call on Twitter to join the Pantograph build and 21 bioinformaticians, programmers, and grant writers from 6 continents volunteered to donate a week’s worth of their time to the round-the-clock effort. The results included 100x improvement in speed and two new major features. Following the hackathon, 10 people committed to continuing to work on Pantograph by donating 10-40 hours a week of their own time. We are currently seeking funding to support that work full-time, thereby accelerating development.