Scientists have identified at least 8 strains of coronavirus revolving globally, even though researchers across the world are working overtime to understand the evolution of the coronavirus, which has caused the disease COVID-19.

Nearly 2,000 genetic sequences of the virus are submitted from different laboratories across world. They are submitted to the open-source project Nextstrain.org and will demonstrate how the virus is travelling into new subtypes.

As per a report in National Geographic, the informations at the site, including samples from every continent except Antractica, has displayed that the virus is taking on an average of 15 days for mutating. However, this does not mean that the coronavirus is becoming dangerous but these mutations are assisting scientists to understand their behavior and origin.

Nextstrain cofounder Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, US, stated that these mutations are totally benign and useful as a puzzle piece to discover the spread of the virus. Observing at the development of the virus has also helped scientists to expose the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus could have originated in laboratories.

According to a study published in the journal Nature Medicine that the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which was emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and since then has caused a large scale COVID-19 pandemic is the product of natural evolution. The exploration of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and associated viruses have found no evidence that the coronavirus was made in a laboratory or else engineered.

Corresponding author on the paper Kristian Andersen, who is an Associate Professor of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research Institute in the US, said that through comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, they have firmly determined that SARS-CoV-2 originated by natural processes only.

Source: ET Healthworld