Rhea Iyer
12th Grade
American Heritage School
of Boca/Delray, Florida
Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 is a crown-like, spiky, RNA virus that attaches itself to the ACE-2 protein to gain access to cells and create flu-like symptoms. COVID-19 has already taken over one million lives and almost thirty trillion dollars in lost output.Vaccine creation requires the weakened virus or bacteria that can’t replicate; since most pathogens mutate over time, understanding these mutations can better help researchers create vaccines that will help larger groups of people for larger amounts of time. The researchers created a method class with a DNA class array in order to illustrate an array sequence with the genomic sequences of a strain of COVID-19 from China in January of 2020 and a strain from the United States from April of 2020. A heat map created from these sequences was used to illustrate the genomic differences between the two sequences as mutations. The mutations were found to exist at the N gene as well as at the ORF10 gene. These genes can be further studied in relation to vaccines being developed in the present or can be isolated in current Coronavirus strains.