The inspiring news, which has now flown out from the Ministry of Health of Russia, inspired in about the same way as the message about the victory over the Nazis at Stalingrad in its time. It seems that a turning point has come in the war against infection that has engulfed humanity. A vaccine is about to appear, otherwise drugs against coronavirus.
“Specialists of the FSBI“Research Institute of Influenza named after A. A. Smorodintsev "The Ministry of Health of Russia was sequenced from material from a patient with COVID-19, the first complete genome of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus from Russia," the news read and encouraged. But it also raised questions. After all, China passed the coronavirus gene to Russia back in January. It turns out that we have done a science-intensive, but unnecessary work?
Specialists located in St. Petersburg Research Institute of Influenza. AA Smorodintseva, with whom I contacted by phone, was quite expectedly informed: the genome shared by the Chinese was, accordingly, Chinese. And the one they sequenced is originally Russian. Since it was extracted from a coronavirus that entered a Russian citizen. By the time he was infected, the infection managed to mutate slightly. The differences are noticeable.
According to doctors, it is entirely possible that the coronaviruses circulating in other countries are also different.
"This coronavirus is new for us, therefore it is critically important to be able to determine the path of its spread and entry into the territory of our country, its changes," the Ministry of Health of Russia quotes the words of the acting Director of the St. Petersburg Research Institute of Influenza, Doctor of Medical Sciences Dmitry Lioznov.
By the way, Russian scientists have already shared the obtained genetic data with their colleagues: “they have deposited them in the international EpiCoV GISAID database, used by WHO and the world's leading research groups to monitor the global evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus”.
REFERENCE
Promotional video:
Sequencing is the decoding of the amino acid or nucleotide sequence of the genome, which provides the most complete set of data on the structure of certain organisms. Or, for example, viruses.
SARS-CoV-2 (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), aka 2019-nCoV (2019 novel coronavirus) in an earlier version, aka Wuhan coronavirus is a new strain of coronavirus detected at the end of 2019.
COVID-19 is a dangerous infectious disease that causes the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
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Online map of the spread of coronavirus
