A higher number of infections and the circulation of the new morecontagious variants of coronavirus around the world have created analarming situation.

In particular, new variants of coronavirus that emerged recently in the UK,South Africa, and Brazil could pose a threat to vaccination and coulddiminish the effectiveness of the existing vaccines.

These new variants of coronavirus have a startling number of changes in thevirus’s spike protein, the part that fits into the receptor in human cells,allowing it to infect people.

As a result, there is a pressing need to pinpoint differences intransmissibility between these new versions and earlier versions of thecoronavirus.

Recently, Dr. Amir Ali Abbasi, Professor, and Chairperson at the NationalCenter for Bioinformatics, Quaid-i-Azam University, in collaboration withhis Chinese partner Professor Dr. Dong-Qing Wei from Shanghai Jiao TongUniversity analyzed the biological mechanisms behind the higher infectivityand transmission of the emerging strains of coronavirus.

These researchers used multiple computational algorithms and disclosed thatthe South African and Brazilian variants are more lethal than the UKvariant (N501Y).

The study suggests that mutations in the newly emerged variants ofcoronavirus have altered the binding affinity of the virus to human cells,create new inter-protein contacts, and thereby has increased thetransmissibility and infectivity of the virus.

The study also pinpoints differences in transmissibility between thesemutations and earlier versions of the virus.

Dr. Amir Ali Abbasi, who co-led the research said “the part of the virusthat interacts with human cells is subjected to continues evolution sincethe first reports of patients with atypical pneumonia or COVID-19 in lateDecember 2019”.

“These changes seem to give the virus a greater advantage or enhanced itsability to propagate and that appears to be what’s happening with the UK,Brazilian, and South Africa mutations” he further said.

Dr. Amir Ali Abbasi warned that coronavirus might have evolved enough toevade the Covid-19 vaccines that have been approved so far.

Professor Dong-Qing Wei who is the principal investigator of this studyadded that “computational biology and artificial intelligence technologyoffers a new hope that a cure to COVID-19 might be developed faster thanever before through mechanism-based drug discovery.

“Many targets for the design of drugs have been already identified, andstudies are in progress to explore these potential targets” He furtheradded.