1/n The most prestigious S&T awards in the country are the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards, named after the Founder Director General of @CSIR_IND -announced on the Foundation Day, i.e. 26th Sept every year. It's my privilege to announce this year's winners:
2. Authors have not actually built a parsimonious tree, and tested its fitness by say bootstrap. They conveniently used a new root citing "global pairwise mutations" & stopped there. Ideally, different root and branch arrangements needs to be statistically tested for validating.
(3) The diversity of reported strains are dependent on multiple factors, starting from total no. of samplings, how many diverse places/districts have been covered, the time span of the samples collected etc.
There is a discussion going on with possible origin of SARS-CoV2 with a Bioinformatics analyses. The preprint has arrived at erroneous conclusions, independent critics are as follows in the series
In the preprint , Libing Shen et al analysed 4571 SARS-CoV-2 genomes to identify least mutated strains and suggests Wuhan is not the place where the first human-to-human transmission occurred. The paper is not yet peer reviewed.
3/n
Athors suggest that least mutated strains of SARS-CoV-2 should be the earliest strains- an unsubstantiated claim. The number of variations depend on the methodology for sequencing, quality of the sequencing reads as well as the bioinformatics & therefore not comparable