19 genetic variants of Covid-19 that can dodge antibodies found in India: Study

A new study has found that at least 19 genetic variants of Covid-19 in India have advanced to dodge the neutralizing antibodies that the immunity system generates to fight the virus.

The study, published in the journal biorxiv, stated that one of the mutated variants is the reason behind the reinfection cases in India.

The study was carried out by the researchers at the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB), New Delhi; Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), CSIR-HRDC, Uttar Pradesh, and Kurnool Medical College in Andhra Pradesh.

The researchers detected 120 ‘immune escape variants’ in SARS-CoV-2 from across the world.

An immune escape variant of the virus is a mutation that helps it to evade the immune system.

“Our analysis suggests that a number of genetic variants associated with immune escape have emerged in global populations,” the authors wrote in the study.

For the study, the researchers collected data from 2,65,079 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from a global database, apart from sequencing over 1,154 genomes in their labs.

Of the 19 immune escape variants found in genomes from India, one is particular — known as S:N440K variant — was found to be in 2.1 per cent of the gene sequences in India.

This variant has a high prevalence in Andhra Pradesh — where 33.8 per cent of the 272 sequenced genomes had this variant, the study noted.

Their analysis also suggested that the variant evolved within India in the recent months.