===================
What is Nextstrain?
===================

Nextstrain is a project to harness the scientific and public health potential
of pathogen genome data.  Our goal is to aid epidemiological understanding of
pathogen spread and evolution and improve outbreak response.

.. sidebar:: Motivation

    We believe that if pathogen genome sequences are going to inform public health
    interventions, then analyses have to be rapidly conducted and results widely
    disseminated.  Current scientific publishing practices often hinder the rapid
    dissemination of epidemiologically relevant results.  An open, online system
    that implements robust bioinformatic pipelines to synthesize data from across
    research groups has the highest capacity to make epidemiologically actionable
    inferences.

.. rubric:: Pathogen surveillance

Our website, `nextstrain.org <https://nextstrain.org>`_, provides real-time
snapshots of evolving pathogen populations such as `SARS-CoV-2
<https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2>`__, `influenza
<https://nextstrain.org/flu>`__, and `Ebola <https://nextstrain.org/ebola>`__.
We use interactive visualizations to enable exploration of curated datasets and
analyses which are continually updated when new genomes are available.  This
offers a powerful pathogen surveillance tool to virologists, epidemiologists,
public health officials, and community scientists. In many cases old snapshots of
these analyses are able to be easily accessed, see :doc:`viewing previous analyses
</guides/snapshots>` for more.

.. rubric:: Open-source software

The software we write to power :doc:`all parts </learn/parts>` of
Nextstrain---bioinformatics, visualizations, analysis pipelines, data
management, and more---is entirely `open-source <https://opensource.org/osd>`__
and `available to the public <https://github.com/nextstrain>`__.  We aim to
empower the wider genomic epidemiology and public health communities to tweak
our analyses, create new ones, and communicate scientific insights using the
same tools we do.

.. rubric:: A platform for sharing

nextstrain.org_ is not just our platform: we're dedicated to supporting the
work of the community through :doc:`Nextstrain Groups
</guides/share/groups/index>` and :doc:`other sharing mechanisms
</guides/share/index>`.  Our intent is to lower the barriers for public health
organizations and research labs to both share their results publicly and
collaborate privately.