Sri Lanka has taken measures to boost the complex genomic surveillance capacities needed to detect and respond to new variants of coronavirus.
Director of Operations and Clinical Services at Allergy Immunology and Cell Biology Unit Dr. Chandima Jeewandara yesterday said that the measures have already been taken to use Oxford Nanopore technology instead of the Illumina sequencing used to identify new strains of coronavirus.
Virus genome sequencing is playing a vital role in the efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Continued genome sequencing is enabling health authorities, governments and researchers to monitor the evolution of COVID-19 and adjust the response accordingly.
Dr. Jeewandara said that the Oxford Nanopore technology was more efficient than Illumina technology.
He further said that genome sequencing under the Oxford Nanopore technology was inexpensive and could be done in two days. Dr. Jeewandara said that the genetic analysis done under Illumina technology is expensive and tests take five days.
He said that with these technologies, analysis with a capacity of 96 samples could be performed at a time.
According to the World Health Organization sources, Genome sequencing is the process of determining the complete DNA sequence of an organism’s genome, or all of the genetic material of an organism, at a single time.
Genomic sequencing allowed scientists to determine the strain or strains of the virus responsible for the current outbreak. It also allowed them to assess whether there are any mutations and, if so, the implications of these mutations.
Finally, it enables scientists to find out the relationship between the currently circulating virus strains and previously circulating strains.
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