GEOGRAPHICAL BASED GENOMIC AND PATHOGENIC STUDY OF THE SARS-COV-2

The current pandemic COVID 19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 is very contagious and causes respiratory disease outbreaks. In a various genomic analysis, different strains of SARS-CoV-2 was found to infect different geographical locations of the world (India, USA, and Brazil) and also in different parts of India (Kerala, Surat, and Ahmedabad). Different genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from different locations of the world and India are downloaded from the viral genome sequences database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and comparative analysis is performed using various computational tools. Comparison of genome size, G+C content, and identified ORFs is performed for different sequences of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from different geographical locations of the word and also different cities/states of India using various bioinformatics tools. This study concludes that all the sequences isolated from different geographical locations are highly similar to the reference strain of Wuhan, with an identity percentage ranging from 99.56-99.98% and also with the same GC content of 37%. The difference in the identified ORFs of length >150 and a small difference in the identity percentages shows the presence of mutation between different strains of SARS-CoV-2.