Hyderabad : Researchers at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad have developed new equipment and methods to detect various variants of coronavirus in advance and alert public and policy makers about the precautionary measures to be taken to curb the spread of the deadly disease.
Ever since the novel coronavirus detected in Wuhan in China in 2019, the coronavirus has been mutating in different forms and is escaping the human immune response system and causing severe disease and killed millions of people across the globe. During the first, second and third waves of the Covid pandemic, different mutant variants of the coronavirus were responsible for its peak rise. As one form subsides with people gets their immune strength against them, then the virus mutates into other forms and once again begin its infection spree by bypassing the human immune response system.
“Ever since the eruption of Covid pandemic in 2019, there has been adverse impact on various sectors of growth across the globe. In view of this, the CCMB had devised a new equipment and developed new methods to detect and identify the possible mutant variants of the coronavirus in advance and advise the policy makers and the public to take preventive measures to contain the possible spread of the viral infection,” informed Viney K Nandicoori, director of CCMB.
To identify the new possible variants, the CCMB has appointed a team of scientists who are continuously working on Covid and tracking the new possible mutant variants. “We are constantly discovering new variants of the deadly Sars-Cov-2 virus by conducting genetic analysis of patients’ samples during the first and second wave of Covid pandemic not just from India but from across the globe. The analysis is based on single nucleotide variations (SNVs) that propagate in a viral genome, leading to changes when the virus spreads from one person to another. The extent to which the mutations are present is determined by the host’s single nucleotide variations (ISNV) analysis. It has been speculated that as the frequency of newly seen mutations increasing it is likely to become the type of variant that causes the most prevalence,” informed a researcher from CCMB.
While explaining how a virus evolves with new mutations while still in the patient’s body, the scientists said to understand that the researchers collected 1,347 samples from various parts of the globe including China, Germany, Malaysia, United Kingdom, USA and India and analyzed these samples. During their analysis it was observed that 16,410 ISNVs were spread in the viral genome of the then prevalent B1 and B6 strains during the first wave of Covid pandemic.
The researchers carrying out their research further during the second wave they conducted genetic analysis of more than 1,770 specimens from different parts of India and identified that the prevailing Covid variant as to be the Delta variant.
In this way, by tracking the ISNVs as part of their genetic surveillance the scientists are able to identify beforehand the possible variant of the Covid strain and predict the types of the viruses that will reach the level of high spreading peak.
Apart from researchers from CCMB, scientists from Delhi based Instated of Genomcis and Integrative Biology (IGIB), National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Indian institute of Technology (IIT-Jodhpur) are also involved in the research of detecting the new variants in advance.
