Another extension of NUST tenacious undertakings to struggle for SARS-CoV2 Pandemic and after successful establishment for evaluating the diagnosis of the disease.
Associate Professor Dr Aneela Javed and Assistant Professor Dr Ali Zohaib are faculty members at NUST Atta-ur-Rahman School of Applied Biosciences (ASAB), in another ground-breaking scientific discovery, have sequenced the complete genome of SARS-CoV2.
The National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) aims to emerge as a leading research intensive university of Pakistan, comparable to the top universities of the world. The University will fulfill its responsibility of graduating culturally enlightened, technologically knowledgeable, and academically competent and research-oriented productive citizens who are prepared to lead, to inspire, and to serve humanity. The University commits itself and all its resources to this trust and responsibility.
This will open up new avenues in tracing the evolutionary origin of SARS-CoV2 that infected Pakistani patients, and will be useful in comparative genome analysis.
This is indeed a much-needed breakthrough, as it was the need of the hour to understand the origin of the virus – this will not only help to develop more accurate diagnostic assays for this virus but will also be applied in vaccine development studies.
The project has been completed in collaboration with Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) Rawalpindi, and Charite-Berlin Germany. The sequence was published through National Genome Data Centre China, on March 25, 2020, making it the first genome sequence of SARS-CoV2 to be published from Pakistan, and is now available on NCBI, GISAID and NEXTRAIN.