South Korean researchers succeed in mapping out COVID19
Newly discovered chemical modification will also help to understand the life cycle of the virus.
Biznextindia : Researchers across the world are working on war time basis to find solutions to the challenges posed by the Coronavirus. While countries like the USA, ISRAEL and Germany have made significant progress on development of vaccine, South Korean researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough in identifying the RNA map of COVID19.
A team of Researchers at the Centre for RNA research at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have analyzed the RNA transcript of COVID-19 for the first time in the world. This breakthrough has paved the way for the development of high-precision reagents and therapeutic drugs for the novel coronavirus.
The research team led by Professors KIM V. Narry and CHANG Hyeshik has succeeded in dissecting the architecture of SARS-CoV-2 RNA genome, in collaboration with Korea National Institute of Health (KNIH) within Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC), according to a report by IBS.
“Not only to detailing the structure of SARS-CoV-2, we also discovered numerous new RNAs and multiple unknown chemical modification on the viral RNAs. Our work provides a high-resolution map of SARS-CoV-2. This map will help understand how the virus replicates and how it escapes the human defense system,” explains Professor KIM V. Narry, the corresponding author of the study” read the report.
The researchers have suggested that modified RNAs may have new properties that are different from unmodified RNAs even though they have the same genetic information in terms of RNA base sequence. They believe if they figure out the unknown characteristics of RNA, the findings may offer a new clue for combatting the new coronavirus. Newly discovered chemical modification will also help to understand the life cycle of the virus.
Worldwide number of COVID19 cases has crossed the 1.6 million mark; death toll has also touched 1 lakh. However, the good news is that more than 3 lakh 66 thousand people have recovered from the deadly virus.