Analysis of corona virus genome sequences
Jingchu Luo1
1luojc@pku.edu.cn, Centre of Bioinformatics, Peking University
The recent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in a dozen of countries especially in China, makes it urgent to explore the possible cause of this disease. Several papers have been published indicating that the human corona virus is the major causative factor. 27 corona virus genome sequences including 9 SARS viruses were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. ClustalW analysis reveals that all these SARS sequences are identical except for several mismatches, mostly due to sequencing errors. Multiple sequence alignment was also performed to the different groups of corona virus genome sequence to find conservative and divergent regions. Comparative analysis of putative protein coding product was also carried out among these groups. All the analysis results are being deposited to the CBI ftp site (ftp://ftp.cbi.pku.edu.cn/pub/sars/analysis/) which is accessible to the public for the further study.