Lineage Detector: Efficient Tool for Detecting New SARS-Cov-2 Lineages

ABSTRACT Since the novel virus of SARS-Cov-2’s emergence, it continues to mutate at significant speed. The mutation speed and diversity of the virus has reached a level that is hard to be analysed purely via human tracing even with the help of UShER trees. We create an open-sourced tool of Lineage Detector , an automated tool that helps highlight the most important lineages of interest on Usher trees. Lineage Detector can highlight the most interesting SARS-CoV-2 branches for manual investigation and reduce the work of volunteer variant hunters to 8 ∼ 10%, greatly improve their efficiency. Since its release, it has helped the identification, proposal and designation process of more than 100 SARS-CoV-2 variants.