Why in News?

• An automated computational tool – Infectious Pathogen Detector (IPD) – developed earlier by researchers at the Mumbai-based ACTREC, Tata Memorial Centre, to identify the presence of 1,060 different pathogens in any genome sequence sample and perform mutation and phylogenetic analysis has become even more useful with the addition of a module for SARS-CoV-2 virus.

What is mutation?

• Mutation is an alteration in the genetic material (the genome) of a cell of a living organism or of a virus that is more or less permanent and that can be transmitted to the cell’s or the virus’s descendants.
• When cells multiply, the DNA within them replicates as well, to make copies for the new cells. During replication, random errors are introduced into the new DNA.
• While the errors in DNA virus genomes can be corrected by the error-correcting function of cells in which they replicate, there are no enzymes in cells to correct RNA errors. Therefore, RNA viruses accumulate more genetic changes (mutations) than DNA viruses.

About the tool

• Researchers say that the tool can automatically determine the abundance of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences, carry out mutation analysis with respect to the Wuhan sequence and finally, based on the mutations seen in each sample, assign it to the respective phylogenetic clade.
• Assigning a sample to a phylogenetic clade is based on the complete profile of mutations seen in the sample.
• Researchers can either upload sequence data to the IPD server which then automatically analyses the data for mutations and then assign the sample to the respective phylogenetic clade or download the tool before using it for bulk analysis

 Reference:

1. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/tool-to-ease-sars-cov-2-genome-mutation-analysis/article33769494.ece