at least for identifying variants, you don’t necessarily need to know the full (highly complex) structure of each variant, just the relevant diffs from the orig

at least for identifying variants, you don’t necessarily need to know the full (highly complex) structure of each variant, just the relevant diffs from the original variant, and computer modeling to tease out whether the diffs are significant enough to warrant a ‘variant’ label (along with epidemiological data, of course). once identified and labeled, pcr can give you enough information (via the differing prevalences of short sequences of dna/rna that act like unique fingerprints) to tell the variants apart without needing to know anything about the structure.