Bangladesh has so far sequenced 304 genomes of Covid-19 and submitted them to Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID).
Professor Dr Aftab Ali Shaikh, chairman of Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR), said this at a press conference today.
Different international organisations praised Bangladeshi scientists for their achievement in genome sequencing of Covid-19 samples, Dr Aftab said.
“CNN’s senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen recently said countries with far fewer resources, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Suriname, had processed samples more quickly than the US.”
When asked about a BCSIR scientist’s comment that a new Covid-19 strain – similar to the one recently found in the UK – was detected in Bangladesh, he said, “We are still working on it.”
“Genome sequencing is essentially determining the order of chemical ‘bases’ of a DNA molecule. Scientists use these sequences to identify genes, regulatory instructions, or in the case of Covid-19, mutations to a virus,” said William A Haseltine, a former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health.
Photo credit: Collected
News source: UNB
