Research at Advanced Photon Source laid the groundwork for effective COVID-19 vaccines There is light at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic tunnel. Several vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 are now in clinical trials, with one -- developed by Pfizer/BioNTech -- already having been approved for emergency use in the United States. This has been the fastest development and rollout of any vaccine in history, starting with the first gene sequence released in January. (The previous record was held by the mumps vaccine, which took four years.) But while this may seem like an overnight success story, the speed and effectiveness of these new vaccines can be in part attributed to the decades of research into infectious diseases that preceded the COVID-19 outbreak. Case in point: five of the vaccines, including those developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, contain genetic mutations that increase their effectiveness, mutations based upon work dating back more than 10 years using the resources of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.