Coronavirus in Italy and Iran Is Different from Other Countries, Study Finds
“There are different viruses spread globally under the name of COVID-19,” bioinformatics analysis suggests.
Researchers at Istanbul Gelisim University, H. Al-Najjar and N. Al-Rousan, recently published a study titled, “Are Italy and Iran really suffering from COVID-19 epidemic? A controversial study,” in European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences. Their study has been indexed in PubMed, arguable the most credible and widely-used academic database.
In this study, they compiled virus DNA sequences of patients suffering from the current pandemic in seven different countries — Spain, the USA, China, Italy, Iran, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The Istanbul researchers wanted to decode how COVID-19 has evolved around the world.
To this end, they aligned the protein sequences (that were translated from the DNA sequences) using a basic bioinformatics alignment tool. The resulting alignment was then used to generate a phylogenetic tree to infer evolutionary groups and relationships.
