VENAS2: Bidirectional Mutation Modeling for Genomic Surveillance Reveals Reversions and Hidden Transmission Links in Pathogens.

VENAS2 reconstructs SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary history from 7.25 million GISAID genomes (Dec 2019–Jun 2024) while explicitly modeling bidirectional mutations to infer variant timing.

• Why it matters: Current genomic surveillance methods often treat mutations as unidirectional, which can mask reversions and distort lineage and transmission inferences.
• What they did: VENAS2 builds spatiotemporal evolutionary networks by integrating genomic, temporal, and geographic data with bidirectional mutational modeling, then applies it to SARS-CoV-2, Viridian, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
• The result: In Viridian, it finds 4,654 genomic sites with at least one potential reversion event, and in Mycobacterium tuberculosis it identifies over threefold additional transmission clusters, enriched for drug-resistant strains.

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