Rajasthan To Develop Facilities To Study New Covid Strain
In the wake of the new strain of the Corona Virus found in the United Kingdom, the Rajasthan government is proactively taking measures to develop facilities to help study the strain of Covid that has changed. The Sawai Man Singh Medical College in Jaipur will start virus sequencing to detect the mutation in the virus. The sequencing lab is expected to be functioning from January.
The sequencing lab will be functioning soon, but for now, we are sending our samples to a lab in Delhi to find out if there is any mutation to the virus, said Dr Sudhir Bhandari, the principal and controller of the SMS Medical College. He also said that so far 00 samples have been sent to the lab in Delhi and no mutation have been found.
According to doctor Nitya Vyas, the head of the department, microbiology department, SMS Medical Collage said that initially whole-genome sequencing will not be done, spike proteins and specific genes like the ORF and n-gene, etc. If any changes will be found in the spike proteins, it shows that infectivity of the virus has changed.
In Covid, the spike proteins play a key role in infecting human cells. If there is a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the infectivity of the virus may increase.
