SEATTLE – With the U.S. on Tuesday recording its first known case of the novel coronavirus variant that’s been sweeping across the U.K., the pressure is on to track the variant’s spread and parse out why it seems to be more contagious — and what that means for the future of the pandemic. At the center of those efforts is a group at the Seattle-based Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center that has been cataloging and analyzing genetic changes in the virus since the pandemic began. Nexstrain, co-founded by Hutch computational biologist Trevor Bedford, is an uber-dashboard of genomics, mapping out…