A cough, fever, pain, weakness, and difficulty breathing—those were the 41-year-old’s symptoms when he was admitted to a Wuhan hospital in late December 2019. The previously healthy man had fallen ill six days earlier, according to a paper in the journal Nature, but tests for influenza and other infections were turning up negative. Scientists had a mystery on their hands. Solving it by identifying the cause of the man’s disease would be a first step toward taming the outbreak cropping up in Wuhan that winter. And thanks to cutting edge genome sequencing technology, researchers completed that task with remarkable speed.

A team in Shanghai analyzed the sample from the Wuhan patient in less than two days, using “the latest high-throughput sequencing technology,” to parse out unknown pathogens from a stew of genetic material in a sample. What they found: a genetic sequence highly similar to a bat SARS-related coronavirus, the pathogen that we now know of as the virus that causes COVID-19.

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