In the next three to four weeks, Indian researchers hope to get at least 200 to 300 isolates of SARS-COV2 virus which causes novel coronavirus disease (COVID19). This, they said, would help them to have better understanding about the behaviour of this deadly virus.
Two Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) labs -- Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad and Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi -- have started working together to sequence the whole genome of SARS-CoV2 virus, an official statement said.
This will help understand the evolution of the virus, how dynamic it is and how fast it mutates. This study will help comprehend how fast it evolves, said CCMB DIrector Rakesh Mishra.
For this purpose, National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune has also been requested to give viral strains that have been isolated from different places. This will help the scientists to cover the whole country to get a bigger and clearer picture. This will help the institutes to establish the family tree of the virus. Based on this, the scientists can ascertain from where the virus has come, the varied mutations and which strain is weak and what strain is strong. “This will give some strategic clues to understand it and to implement better isolation strategies,” he said.
The statement further said, whole-genome sequencing is the method used to determine the complete DNA sequence of a specific organism’s genome. The approach for sequencing the virus involves getting samples from patients that have are found to be positive and sending these samples to a sequencing lab.
Genome sequencing need a number of samples for study. “Without much data if you make any conclusion that may not be right. At the moment we are accumulating as many sequences as we can and once, we have few hundred sequences with us, then we will be able to make inferences on biological aspects of this virus,” said Mishra.