KARACHI, APR 03 (DNA) – Dean, Faculty of life Sciences, Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi and professor of molecular biology Dr. Kamran Azim  asked  the scientific community to be remained careful   when communicating technical aspects of COVID19 infection to the public.

In a statement issued here Friday, he pointed out that during last few days, some headlines regarding the dissimilarity of genomes of Corona virus from Chinese and Pakistani patients have been published in newspapers having technically flawed. He told that hundreds of corona virus genomes have been sequenced globally and all of them showed 99.5 to 99.9% identities with the original Wuhan corona virus.

He further told that until today, two corona virus genome sequence datasets from Pakistan (i.e. NUST, Islamabad and ARID Rawalpindi) have been reported. Dr. Kamran Azim said that as per our bioinformatics analysis revealed that corona virus genome from Pakistani patients is 99.7% identical with Wuhan corona virus genome.

He said that these findings clearly indicated that Corona virus has low mutation rate hence without doing further experiments, it is impossible to state that Corona virus in Pakistan (or in Karachi) is different from China. =DNA

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