Credit: turek from Pexels Researchers have developed a powerful new tool that can track how microbes spread between people with unprecedented precision, offering new ways to prevent infections and improve treatments in the future. The research, published April 24 in Nature Microbiology , describes how the new tool, called TRAnsmision Clustering of Strains (TRACS), uses genomics to distinguish between closely related strains of microbes. In a collaboration between experts at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Australia, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Oslo, researchers used the TRACS tool to map the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the bacterium that causes pneumonia, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, across different populations. The team believes the TRACS tool will play an important role in infection prevention, outbreak response, and the development of treatments designed to help the human microbiome fight infection.…