In one early example of how this may work, Marco Marra, a researcher at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver, last year sequenced the genes from a tumor that had spread from an 80-year-old patient's tongue to his lungs.

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And in the past week, two groups of geneticists, one at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the other at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, have succeeded in sequencing the genomes of coronaviruses isolated from patients in Toronto and Asia.

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