After Studying the genome's Scientists say the Virus Has Mutated at least three times...
- Researchers who mapped some of the original spread of coronavirus in humans have discovered there are variants of the virus throughout the world.
- They reconstructed the early evolutionary paths of Covid-19 as infection spread from Wuhan, China, out to Europe and North America.
- By analysing the first 160 complete virus genomes to be sequenced from human patients, scientists found the variant closest to that discovered in bats was largely found in patients from the US and Australia, not Wuhan.
‘There are too many rapid mutations to neatly trace a Covid-19 family tree. We used a mathematical network algorithm to visualise all the plausible trees simultaneously. ‘These techniques are mostly known for mapping the movements of prehistoric human populations through DNA. We think this is one of the first times they have been used to trace the infection routes of a coronavirus like Covid-19.’ Dr Peter Forster, geneticist and lead author from the University of Cambridge