Brazilian who identified the micron is elected one of the ten scientists of the year by Nature

The magazine Nature listed Brazilian scientist Túlio de Oliveira as one of the ten scientific personalities of the year. Oliveira was the one who sounded the alarm over Covid’s omicron variant, after sequencing it in South Africa and identifying dozens of potentially worrisome mutations.

The omicron, in fact, has shown high levels of transmission and reinfection.

The text of the magazine, which appoints Oliveira as a tracer of variants, also recalls that the researcher and his Krisp team (KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, were also responsible for identifying and warning about another variant of concern: the beta.

In other words, of the five variants of concern identified by the WHO (World Health Organization), Oliveira participated in the sequencing and discovery of two of them.

Nature claims that the Krisp platform, led by the Brazilian, has been tracking pathogens related to dengue, Zika, AIDS and tuberculosis, but that “so many different samples of the same virus have never been sequenced in such a short period of time”.

Bioinformata and his team did not exclusively help with the sequencing of the variants. Due to the proximity to health professionals on the battlefront, it becomes possible to influence processes.

Oliveira’s team, at the beginning of the pandemic, managed, for example, to map an outbreak of Covid, which resulted in guidelines for the positioning of wards in hospitals, in order to prevent the spread of the virus.

To the journal Nature, Oliveira said he was disappointed with the restrictions imposed by several countries —including Brazil— on travelers from South Africa after the announcement of the omicron.

“Of course I expected more,” said the expert, who also said the restrictive measure “was almost a smokescreen for the accumulation of vaccines and for the rich countries that lost control of the pandemic.”

Oliveira, the only Brazilian on the Nature list, was born in Brasília and lived in several states until his family settled in Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul. He graduated in biotechnology at UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) and moved to South Africa in 1997 when his mother went to work in the country.

Nature’s 2021 list also highlights scientists Winnie Byanyima, Friederike Otto, Zhang Rongqiao, Timnit Gebru, John Jumper, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Guillaume Cabanac, Meaghan Kall, and Janet Woodcock.