The coronavirus pandemic that is spreading fast all around the world has put life at a standstill. The countries across the globe are fighting to contain the virus.?
The coronavirus originated from China's Wuhan and there has been speculations about deliberate genetic engineering of new the virus. But now the whole myths have been busted by scientists from the Scripps Research Institute, a non-profit research organization, claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic is not from a lab-created virus but has a natural origin.
The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan, China last year and has since caused a large scale COVID-19 epidemic is the product of natural evolution.
The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered, according to findings published today in the journal Nature Medicine.
¡°By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes,¡± said Kristian Andersen, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research and corresponding author on the paper.
The resulting genomic sequence data has shown that Chinese authorities rapidly detected the epidemic and that the number of COVID-19 cases have been increasing because of human to human transmission after a single introduction into the human population.??
The coronavirus has now spread to more than 150 countries, infecting more than 184,000 and killing over 7,500 people.
Shortly after the epidemic began, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and made the data available to researchers worldwide.