“In-silico analysis of Covid-19 genome sequences of Indian origin: impact of mutations in identification of SARS-Co-V2”

Mani, Kabilan; Thirumalmuthu, Kannan; Kathiresan, Divya Sri; Ramalingam, Sudha; Sankaran, Ramalingam; Jeyaraj, Sankarganesh

Covid-19 disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 is still being transmitted in developed and developing countries irrespective of healthcare setups. India with 1.3 billion people in the world is severely affected by Covid-19 with 11.3 million cases and 157,000 deaths so far. We have assessed the mismatches in WHO recommended rRT-PCR assays primer and probe binding regions against SARS-CoV-2 Indian genome sequences through in-silico bioinformatics analysis approach. Primers and probe sequences belonging to CN-CDC-ORF1ab from China and HKU-ORF1b from Hong Kong targeting ORF1ab gene while NIH-TH-N from Thailand, HKU-N from Hong Kong and US-CDCN-2 from USA targeting N genes displayed accurate matches (>98.3 %) with the 2019 novel corona virus sequences from India. On the other hand, none of the genomic sequences displayed exact match with the primer/probe sequences belonging to Charité-ORF1b from Germany targeting ORF1ab gene. We think it will be worthwhile to release this information to the clinical and medical communities working in Indian Covid-19 frontline taskforce to tackle the recently emerging Covid-19 outbreaks as of March-2021.