South African scientists could be at the brink of finding possible vaccine for #Covid19 through genome sequencing

Studying the case of South African #Covid19 patient Van Heusden said, “When we put it together, we found that in this patient, the virus had six differences in its 29,000 RNA letters compared with virus samples recorded in China, where the virus was detected at the end of 2019. Six differences are tiny number and don’t seem to affect how the virus is changing or in the way it produces protein which are the molecular machines that make cells work and the virus genome is like a recipe book of proteins that the virus needs to invade cells and to make copies of itself.”

“Genetic fingerprinting also means we can organize samples into clusters so we can understand how the disease is spreading”, he added.
A previous report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) mentioned how the global community is racing to slow down and eventually halt the spread of COVID-19, a pandemic that has claimed thousands of lives and sickened tens of thousands of others across the globe.
In Africa, the virus has spread to dozens of countries within weeks. Governments and health authorities across the continent are striving to limit widespread infections which moves African scientist from the position of readiness to rapid response concerning the curbing of coronavirus know as #Covid19.

The previous outbreak of listeriosis in South Africa during the first months of 2018 saw the first whole-genome sequencing used to identify the source of the disease outbreak. The co-author of the recent sampling report, Ismail was also at the centre of the listeriosis genome sequencing initiative.

His efforts suggested that the food product – polony – and factories where the contaminated polony was manufactured were immediately identified which helped a great deal to contain the spread of the disease. The scientists also state accurate information gathering from patients who tested positive for #Covid19 is very critical to correlate with the genetic sequence results for a more comprehensive picture of the virus.

Projecting and attempting to respond to future outbreaks through genome sequencing Van Heusden said, “Sadly, Covid-19 will not be the only disease that we will need to fight, so we need genome sequencing techniques to reconstruct a kind of family tree of viruses so we can better predict how and when an outbreak may happen in the future, so we can also be better prepared to fight what’s out there”.
Given the number of confirmed infections globally of 1.3 million means there’s relatively a small number of samples to be able to tackle the origin and behaviour of the virus to develop a vaccine on a global scale, data analysis the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center suggests.