new delhi a multiinstitutional team led by the indian institute of technology iit jodhpur used stateoftheart genomic sequencing methods to identify variations in the ribonucleic acid rna of the covid19 virusthe scientists have also studied the fixation of these intrahost variations into extrahost variations and mutations that lead to variants the results of the twophase study have been published in the journal nucleic acid research iit jodhpur said in a statementan important distinction of this research study is that it was conducted primarily by a team of computational graduates from across distant locations proving that the pandemic has generated novel cooperation sharing and resourcesharing modes for innovative research iit jodhpur saidthe institute further said that the rna structure of the covid19 virus frequently undergoes minor modifications within the host cells intrahost variations these modifications occur at the nucleotide level nucleotide being the building block of the rna molecule many of these intrahost variations are caused by enzymes present in the host cell as an immune responsethus many of these variations are harmless or even destructive to the virus itself however some variations can enhance the survivability of the virus and become fixed as extrahost variations that could potentially lead to variantsofconcern said iit jodhpurthe research team studied intrahost single nucleotide variations isnv using a sequencing platform called illumina during phase 1 of the project in 2020 scientists analyzed the rna structure of virus samples collected from china germany malaysia the united kingdom the united states and different subpopulations of india to map the intrahost singlenucleotide variants isnv across the rna structure of the virusprof mitali mukerji head department of bioscience and bioengineering iit jodhpur who coled the study said one of the most important aspects to managing the covid19 pandemic is to unravel the genetic structure of the virus and pick up early warning signatureswe observed 16410 isnv sites spanning the viral genome and a high density of alterations were present in critical areas that could alter or override the bodys ability to trigger an immune response she addedthe team has observed similar patterns across populations and waves of the pandemic it also tracked the isnvs over time to see if the variants produced inside the host cells can persist outside thereby becoming fixed as snvs they found that by 30 june 2021 about 80 per cent of the isnv sites they had identified in 2020 became fixed as snvs the conversion of isnvs to snvs was substantiated in phase ii studies that showed isnvs were found in most of the delta and kappa variants before their fixation as snvs by february 2021the evolution of snvs from isnvs can affect vaccine response by altering the antibody generation in infected individuals prof mukerji said on the implications of their findings the identification of isnvs can also help in the identification of key sites in the viral rna that are important for its survival and spreadthe research was initiated at the council of scientific and industrial research institute of genomics and