What clues Scientists are giving about the strains of Coronavirus – Burning Issues – Free PDF

• At least eight strains of the coronavirusare making their way around the globe, creating a trail of death and disease that scientists are tracking by their genetic footprints.
• Huddled in once bustling and now almost empty labs, researchers who oversaw dozens of projects are instead focused on one goal: tracking the current strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that cause the illness COVID-19.
• Labs around the world are turning their sequencing machines, most about the size of a desktop printer, to the task of rapidly sequencing the genomes of virus samples taken from people sick with COVID-19. The information is uploaded to a website called NextStrain.org that shows how the virus is migrating and splitting into similar but new subtypes.
• “The virus mutates so slowly that the virus strains are fundamentally very similar to each other,” said Charles Chiu, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
• Its genome is made up of about 30,000 base pairs. Humans, by comparison, have more than 3 billion. So far even in the virus’s most divergent strains scientists have found only 11 base pair changes.
• So far, most cases on the U.S. West Coast are linked to a strain first identified in Washington state. It may have come from a man who had been in Wuhan, China, the virus’ epicenter, and returned home on Jan. 15. It is only three mutations away from the original Wuhan strain
• This isn’t the first time scientists have scrambled to do genetic analysis of a virus in the midst of an epidemic. They did it with Ebola, Zika and West Nile, but nobody outside the scientific community paid much attention.
• “This is the first time phylogenetic trees have been all over Twitter
• The maps are available on NextStrain, an online resource for scientists that uses data from academic, independent and government laboratories all over the world to visually track the genomics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It currently represents genetic sequences of strains from 36 countries on six continents.
• COVID-19 hits people differently, with some feeling only slightly under the weather for a day, others flat on their backs sick for two weeks and about 15% hospitalized.
• The rate varies greatly by country and experts say it is likely tied to testing rates rather than actual mortality.
• Over half of the 50 SARS-CoV-2 virus genomes his San Francisco-based lab sequenced in the past two weeks are associated with travel from outside the state. Another 30% are associated with health care workers and families of people who have the virus.
• “Only 20% are coming from within the community. It’s not circulating widely,” he said.
• That’s fantastic news, he said, indicating the virus has not been able to gain a serious foothold because of social distancing.
• So far researchers don’t have a lot of information about the genomics of the virus inside China beyond the fact that it first appeared in the city of Wuhan sometime between mid-November and mid-December.
• The virus’s initial sequence was published on Jan. 10 by professor Yong-Zhen Zhang at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center.
• Scientists don’t know if there was just one strain circulating in China or more.
• While there remain many questions about the trajectory of the COVID-19 disease outbreak, one thing is broadly accepted in the scientific community: The virus was not created in a lab but naturally evolved in an animal host.
• SARS-CoV-2’s genomic molecular structure – think the backbone of the virus – is closest to a coronavirus found in bats. Parts of its structure also resemble a virus found in scaly anteaters
• “Mutation is the change that occurs in our DNA sequence due to environmental factors such as UV light, or due to the mistakes caused when the DNA is copied.”

• Few mutations result in new versions of proteins and help the organisms to adapt to changes in the environment. Such mutations lead to evolution.
• Mutations in many bacteria result in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that can survive in the presence of antibiotics.
• A unique mutation found in the population of Italy protects them from atherosclerosis, where fatty materials build up in the blood vessels.

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