Based on two pan-Indian studies on the genome of the Covid-19 virus, the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed on Saturday that there is no major mutation in the virus in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting on the Covid-19 pandemic situation and the delivery, distribution and administration of vaccines.
Earlier, the Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had said that the Medical Research Council of India has been conducting large-scale sequencing of nationally representative strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus collected over several months for different periods of time.
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The minister had said that there were no significant or drastic mutations in the strains.
Reports say that around 12,000 mutations have been documented in more than 3.2 million cases globally. Mutation is the evolution that the virus goes through to adapt to various barriers.
A recent study has revealed that the mutation is the reason why Covid-19 death rates are different in various states. An international team, led by researchers from Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Uttar Pradesh, analyzed mutations in the gene responsible for the expression of Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2), a protein on the surface of cells believed to be which acts as a gateway for the new coronavirus into the human body.
Their spatial analysis showed that in India, the frequency of this haplotype, or a combination of mutations, ranged from 33 to 100 percent in different regions.
The researchers, for the first time, also determined a significant positive correlation for the mutation with the lowest infection and fatality rate (CFR) among Indian populations.
“If there were more people with this haplotype in a region, the infectivity of the virus would probably be lower,” Professor Chaubey, who led the study, told the PTI news agency. For example, he noted that Maharashtra and Gujarat, at the state level, have the lowest gene mutation frequency of around 30-40 percent, while the Northeast region with a 75 to 100 percent gene mutation has the lowest frequency. high.
(With PTI inputs)
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