Researchers from the European Union (EU)-funded EVIDENT project said that the Ebola virus mutations had been fewer than feared during the recent outbreak in West Africa, according to a press release from the European Commission on Thursday.The researchers said this means that the diagnostic tools and treatments currently being developed should be effective in fighting the outbreak, given the lower degree of virus mutations.

The researchers traced and mapped out the genetic evolution of the Ebola virus that has resulted in multiple lineages, with deep sequencing of 179 patient samples processed by the European Mobile Laboratory (EMLab) that reveals an epidemiological and evolutionary history of the epidemic from March 2014 to January 2015, as well as analysis of genome evolution of the Ebola virus from a similar sequencing effort of patient samples from Sierra Leone.

These findings were also published in the journal Nature.

The EVIDENT project, supported with 1.7 million euros (1.94 million US dollars) from the EU's Horizon 2020 funding program, is part of the EU-funded European Mobile Laboratory, which was the first rapid response diagnostics unit deployed to the outbreak epicenter in Guinea.