What is Nextstrain?

Nextstrain is a project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data. Our goal is to aid epidemiological understanding of pathogen spread and evolution and improve outbreak response.

Pathogen surveillance

Our website, nextstrain.org, provides real-time snapshots of evolving pathogen populations such as SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and Ebola. We use interactive visualizations to enable exploration of curated datasets and analyses which are continually updated when new genomes are available. This offers a powerful pathogen surveillance tool to virologists, epidemiologists, public health officials, and community scientists. In many cases old snapshots of these analyses are able to be easily accessed, see viewing previous analyses for more.

Open-source software

The software we write to power all parts of Nextstrain—bioinformatics, visualizations, analysis pipelines, data management, and more—is entirely open-source and available to the public. We aim to empower the wider genomic epidemiology and public health communities to tweak our analyses, create new ones, and communicate scientific insights using the same tools we do.

A platform for sharing

nextstrain.org is not just our platform: we’re dedicated to supporting the work of the community through Nextstrain Groups and other sharing mechanisms. Our intent is to lower the barriers for public health organizations and research labs to both share their results publicly and collaborate privately.