Can we track how the virus is spreading in the Ebola outbreak in DR Congo? Claude Science is providing bioinformatics support to scientists at @inrb_kinshasa responding to one of the most pressing global health challenges right now: virological.org/t/reproducti… Drs. Placide Mbala Kingebeni, Tony Wawina Bokalanga, Collins K. Tanui, Emmanuel Lokilo, Princesse Paku, their team, and I used Claude Science to analyze >800 virus genomes and infer the most likely ‘virus family tree’ to reveal when the outbreak started, how and where the virus is spreading, and whether spread is increasing or slowing. Claude Science enables researchers to run complex bioinformatics workflows, including Bayesian phylodynamic inference, and go from sequences to public health insights in minutes (or hours for BEAST X analyses). It also allowed us to compare how stable the results are across >20 different phylodynamic workflows and data subsets, and easily rerun analyses as new data comes in: our current report shows results for genomes released up to last Saturday. Our results are further corroborated by this preprint, posted one day after the initial Claude Science results, which independently estimated the viral effective population size for genomes collected through mid-August and finds the same early growth rate and slowdown since June: medrxiv.org/content/10.64898…