
A baker produces very long strings of icing (RNA molecules) with a piping bag (representative of Oxford Nanopore's MinION technology) filled with complete viruses. RNA virus genome sequences can be read in one string of icing. In this issue, a full-length, direct RNA sequencing approach is used to characterize viral RNAs produced in cells infected with a human coronavirus. (Cover art by Beetlebum, jojo{at}beetlebum.de. [For details, see Viehweger et al., pp. 1545–1554.])