MICROBIOLOGISTS and related scientists in UK and Germany are having their hands full. As they continue their detective work on SARS-CoV-2 – the plot thickens on their hands!
SARS-CoV-2 is spreading around the planet, keeping billions of people under lockdown, another billion hospitalised and it has snuffed out the lives of over a 100,000 – but is the culprit just SARS-CoV-2 – or are there other “partners in crime” masquerading in different cloaks?
[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]The first case was reported sometime in mid November in Wuhan, China. It only took three months for the outbreak to be declared as a pandemic by WHO.
Today, as of April 12, there are 1,777,666 confirmed cases, 108,866 deaths and 365,631 recovered cases. A recent question raised and answered by scientists is – is it the same variant that travelled from China to the rest of the world? This is an important research to understand the severity, transmission rate, and the search for suitable medications.
Here are the findings published by Cambridge University in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by scientists in the UK and Germany on the evolutionary paths of SARS-CoV-2:
- SARS-CoV-2 is divided into three variants: A, B, C.
- The virus in Wuhan appears to be Type B, derived from the type A mutation. This is the main strains in China and have not spread out of East Asia.
- Type A is the root cause of the virus outbreak and appears in the United States and Australia.
- Type A is most similar to viruses extracted from bats and pangolins.
- There are only a few cases of Class A in Wuhan, and they come from Americans who have lived in Wuhan
- Type C viruses are the main type in Europe (France, Italy, Sweden and England), Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea all have this type. It was not found in mainland China.
- Type C evolved from B.
Scientists did this analysis by sequencing the genetic material of virus taken from human patients, studied the mutation patterns and created the viral lineages, and a family tree was traced. This involved mathematical network algorithm.
So why did the virus evolve? The Type A did not travel much outside East Asia perhaps due to the resistance against this type of Covid-19 elsewhere.
This field of research is called phylogenetics – where evolutionary development and diversity of a species is studied. This leads to a new type of virus established from a small and isolated group of infections.
Geneticist Dr Peter Forster, lead author from the University of Cambridge, says, “The Wuhan B-type virus could be immunologically or environmentally adapted to a large section of the East Asian population. It may need to mutate to overcome resistance outside East Asia. We seem to see a slower mutation rate in East Asia than elsewhere, in this initial phase.”
This study helps us to predict future global hot spots of disease transmission and surge. pd
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