Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has praised scientists at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) for successfully sequencing the genome responsible for the Covid-19 global pandemic.
In a social media post he says “Our Ghanaian scientists at Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) at the University of Ghana have successfully found the sequenced genomes of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the global COVID-19 pandemic.
He added that “This is a major contribution to science in the fight against COVID-19 and something for which all Ghanaians should be proud of.”
According to him, “We have the capability and our research institutions do make significant contributions to science. We can do it if we put our minds top it! I am proud of our scientists!”
The discovery by the scientist in the University of Ghana is important because it provides useful information about the genetic composition of the viral strains, at least as far the Ghanaian cases are concerned.
According to the UG scientists, they analysed samples of 15 confirmed cases in Ghana to gain a comprehensive understanding of the variations of the virus present in Ghana.
Background
The SARS-CoV-2 genome was rapidly sequenced by Chinese researchers. It is an RNA molecule of about 30,000 bases containing 15 genes, including the S gene which codes for a protein located on the surface of the viral envelope (for comparison, our genome is in the form of a double helix of DNA about 3 billion bases in size and contains about 30,000 genes).
Comparative genomic analyses have shown that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to the group of Betacoronaviruses and that it is very close to SARS-CoV, responsible for an epidemic of acute pneumonia which appeared in November 2002 in the Chinese province of Guangdong and then spread to 29 countries in 2003. A total of 8,098 cases were recorded, including 774 deaths. It is known that bats of the genus Rhinolophus (potentially several cave species) were the reservoir of this virus and that a small carnivore, the palm civet (Paguma larvata), may have served as an intermediate host between bats and the first human cases.
The University of Ghana discovery found that “while there were some differences between the strains from different countries all the 15 geromes [in Ghana] generally resembled (with 92% similarity) the reference strain that was isolated in the Wuhan province of China where the outbreak began.”
By Melvin Tarlue