#COVID19India #COVID19 #coronavirus
In light of the many reports on coronavirus variant N440K lately, we would like to bring to your attention a few things:
1. The mutant is not new. We have been seeing it in South India since last year.
@CSIR_IND @AndhraPradeshCM
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More👇🏾 2. Though in controlled cell culture this variant makes more copies, it does not necessarily mean that it can compete with other variants just the same way in a real life pandemic where new variants keep coming up. Our genome studies say that N440K is now diminishing
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More👇🏾

Delve into the world of bacteria with the latest paper from Manjula Reddy's lab. They show a novel enzyme that modulates the molecular linkages in bacterial cell-walls.
pnas.org/content/118/19…
@CSIR_IND @PNASNews @Raj_with_sci @pavan_kumarch
Details follow
(1/n) Bacteria have a protective cell-wall around them. It contains an exoskeleton of peptidoglycan. In a big family of bacteria, called the gram-negative bacteria, this is covered by another layer - the outer membrane.
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#longthread
With @csiriict we did a study from 10 Sewage Treatment Plants (STP) and a gated community in Hyderabad to look for SARS-CoV-2 RNA. These STPs get 40% of sewage in the city. We estimated viral load in those samples using RT-PCR.
ccmb.res.in/presscovrg/Was…
@CSIR_IND
1/n Feces are known to contain non-infectious RNA copies of the coronavirus.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26246784/
Sewage treatment plants that get samples from a huge part of a city become good candidates for checking for the viral RNA from many people together.
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Vaccines, drugs, home remedies - where do we stand in #COVID19 management? Here is an 101 series. (1/6) There are anti-viral drugs that are being tested if they work well against #SARSCoV2.
Here is a latest report on the drugs that are being tested @nytimes: nytimes.com/interactive/20…