Speaker: Aylin Bircan
Affiliation: Sabancı University

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has emerged in Wuhan, and spreadacross the continents, and caused the COVID-19 pandemic. In this talk, I will talk about our recent studywhich focuses on comprehensive genomic analysis of the virus isolates in Turkey. We built aphylogenetic tree with globally obtained 15,277 severe SARS-CoV-2 genomes, and clustered the virusisolates based on the phylogenetic tree and previously annotated classification methods. We performed aphylogenetic analysis of the first thirty SARS-CoV-2 genomes isolated and sequenced in Turkey toidentify specific groups circulating in the country. Our results suggest that the first introduction of thevirus to the country is earlier than the first reported case of infection. Virus genomes isolated from Turkeyare scattered among most types in the phylogenetic tree. Two of the seventeen sub-clusters were foundenriched with the isolates of Turkey, which possibly have spread expansively in the country. Finally, wetraced virus genomes based on their phylogenetic placements. This analysis suggested multipleindependent international introductions of the virus and revealed a hub for the inland transmission.