Weizmann Scientists Predict Pandemic Evolution in Lab
When the world was paralyzed by COVID-19, the State of Israel did what it has always done: it fought back with science. Now, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have achieved what once seemed impossible, recreating the evolutionary journey of the coronavirus in a test tube and unlocking the ability to predict how future pandemics will unfold.
In just a few months, the Israeli-led team, working alongside Czech collaborators, replicated the exact evolutionary path the virus followed from the original Wuhan strain to the highly contagious Omicron variants. The findings, published in Nature Communications, mark a turning point in global pandemic preparedness, and they bear the unmistakable imprint of Israeli scientific genius.
From Rehovot to the World: A Breakthrough Born in Israel
The research was led by Prof. Gideon Schreiber of the Weizmann Institute, together with Dr. Jirí Zahradník of Charles University in Prague and the BIOCEV Center. Zahradník, who previously completed his postdoctoral work in Schreiber's lab at Weizmann, focused on weak selection pressure scenarios, while the Rehovot-based team tackled stronger selection dynamics.
The experiment itself was led by Aviv Shoshany from Schreiber's team at Weizmann. Using genetically engineered baker's yeast cells, the scientists exposed millions of viral variants to human receptors and retained only those that bound successfully. By repeating cycles of mutation and selection, they reconstructed the evolution of the virus-human interaction over the course of an entire pandemic, in fast forward.