Aylin Bircan received my BSc degree in Chemistry from Koc University in 2012. She worked in Quality Control and Assurance departments of several pharmaceutical companies. In 2018 she received my MSc degree in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from Kadir Has University. Since 2018 September, she has been a Ph.D. student in Molecular Biology, Genetics and Bioengineering program at Sabanci University. she has been working on phylogenetic analysis of Class C GPCRs under the supervision of Dr. Ogün Adebali.
Abstract
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has emerged in Wuhan, and spread across the continents, and caused the COVID-19 pandemic. In this talk, I will talk about our recent study which focuses on comprehensive genomic analysis of the virus isolates in Turkey. We built a phylogenetic tree with globally obtained 15,277 severe SARS-CoV-2 genomes, and clustered the virus isolates based on the phylogenetic tree and previously annotated classification methods. We performed a phylogenetic analysis of the first thirty SARS-CoV-2 genomes isolated and sequenced in Turkey to identify specific groups circulating in the country. Our results suggest that the first introduction of the virus to the country is earlier than the first reported case of infection. Virus genomes isolated from Turkey are scattered among most types in the phylogenetic tree. Two of the seventeen sub-clusters were found enriched with the isolates of Turkey, which possibly have spread expansively in the country. Finally, we traced virus genomes based on heir phylogenetic placements. This analysis suggested multiple independent international introductions of the virus and revealed a hub for the inland transmission.
