TORONTO -- As highly infectious variants of COVID-19 continue to spread around the world, Canadian researchers are among those who have tracked more than 300,000 versions of the virus.

Researchers at the University of Western Ontario have developed a new web application, called Covizu, to visually represent all of the virus’ mutations in a straightforward and palatable way.

The platform is an open source project that aims to visualize the global diversity of SARS-CoV-2 genomes. The data is provided by the Global Influenza Surveillance Aid (GISAID) - a global science initiative that provides open access to real-time genomic data of viruses.

Researchers around the world are collecting data on these mutations daily, and so far they have identified more than 300,000 unique genetic versions of the COVID-19 virus, which are collected into categories described as lineages or variants. The lineage represents which mutations derive from a common ancestor, and the variants refer to the mutated strain of the virus.

Users can filter the data by samples in order to get a clear understanding of each of the virus’ mutations in a user-friendly way.

“What we are trying to do is provide some estimate of how the virus is moving around,” Art Poon, associate professor at Western University and the main developer of CoVizu, said in a press release.

By tracking all of these variations, the web app provides interactive visualizations of the data and its mutations in real-time. The platform summarizes when and where outbreaks occur and users can navigate between different lineages as the virus is transmitted globally.

Every different name of the virus is picked methodically and is derived from a string of letters and numbers that represents each unique lineage of the virus.

“We also immediately realized that there is so much data that we needed to have some way of enabling users to search through it in a meaningful way,” said Poon.

Poon and his team of researchers have collected more than half a million virus samples from around the world and turned the data into a visual tree graph. Each horizontal line of the graph represents one or more samples of SARS-CoV-2 that share the same genome sequence.

“A major part of this project is making this data accessible and informative so the average person can look at it and understand what the numbers mean to them,” said Emmanuel Wong, a master’s student supervised by Poon.

“What it does is allow people to look at these variants and understand how they got here and where they came from."

The university hopes its data will help give researchers a better understanding of COVID-19 strains without stigmatizing places or people associated with them.

Historically, diseases would be named after places where they were derived, but more recently scientists have been trying to stray away from the outdated language.

Terms such as "U.K. variant" and "Brazil variant" have often been used by governments and media organizations to describe the mutations, but some worry this may lead to racism or imperialism.

“CoVizu is an effort to provide another tool in our toolkit for understanding the genetic diversity of these viruses,” said Poon.

“We know that genomic epidemiology is important and having this data is important, because the fact that we can see and identify variants of concern is made possible by sharing data."