Title: Genome sequence analysis of SARS COV 2 isolated from a covid 19 patient in Erbil, Iraq

Abstract

In the city of Wuhan, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was frst recognized among humans at the end of December 2019, and has since spread to every country around the world. The emergence of this new coronavirus has attracted global attention to work towards funding a treatment and developing an effective vaccine against the virus. In this study, we sequence a full genome of SARS-COV-2 isolated from a male patient in the city of Erbil, Iraq. The virus was sequenced using Sanger sequencer and 21 distinct mutations were found in our isolate compared to the full genome sequence of the SARS-COV-2 isolated from the city of Wuhan/China (Accession number: NC_045512.2). Sequence analysis showed that four of the mutations were located at the spike glycoprotein (S), and ten of them were in non-structural proteins (nsp1, nsp3, nsp12, and orf3a), which had been shown to be related to structural changes at various sites. Moreover, phylogenetic analysis and transmission supported the conclusion that the cases in Iraq were of independent origins of infections and had a close relation to the isolates from Iran. This is the first report on the DNA sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 genome isolated from the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

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