Until this March, machines at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts were busy sequencing enough information for a complete human genome every 10 minutes. The DNA sequencing center is among the world's largest genomics labs. Genomics is an area of molecular biology concerned with the structure and mapping of genetic material of living organisms. When the disease COVID-19 started spreading in the United States, scientists at the institute had an idea. What if their genome-reading machines could be repurposed and used to test patient samples for the coronavirus? Over a period of two weeks in March, the laboratory reinvented itself. It went from sequencing the 3 billion letters of a human genome to sequencing the 30,000-letter genome of the virus.