New Delhi, Dec 2 (IANS): More than one lakh SARS-CoV-2 genomes have been sequenced till November 2021, the Parliament was told on Thursday.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday, Science and Technology Minister Dr Jitendra Singh said that the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), being coordinated by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), has sequenced 1,02,880 SARS-CoV-2 genomes as on November 25.

A total of 17 Covid-19 Bio-repositories have been notified by the Centre, and are being set up at laboratories of the DBT, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, and the Indian Council of Medical Research, he said

On the question of the number of Covid-19 Bio-repositories and samples that were made available to academia and industry for product development, the Minister said that DBT funded Biorepository at ILBS, New Delhi has shared 1,299 samples with academia.

The AILS Bhubaneswar has provided samples from the biorepository to 18 research and development projects, NCCS Pune has shared a total of 124 samples so far with academia and industry, while Bengaluru STEM has shared a total of 363 samples so far with academia and industry.

The NCR Biotech Science Cluster Translational Health Science and Technology Institute & Regional Centre for Biotechnology Faridabad have shared a total of 20,890 samples so far with academia and industry, he added.

The CSIR-CCMB shared about 200 samples with incubatees at CCMB-Atal Incubation Centre for development of interferometry antibody detection, 200 samples for development of in house Elisa-based assays, and about 250 samples were shared for development of RT-PCR assays, he added.

The CSIR-IGIB Bio-repository has been used to help testing and validation of diagnostic products. CSIR-IMTECH made available 15 samples for academic research in IMTECH and 30 samples were shared with PGIMER, Chandigarh for quality control analysis of RT-PCR testing, he informed the house.