Hyderabad, Dec 3 (UNI) The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), confirmed the first two cases of the Omicron variant in Bengaluru on Thursday.NCBS is part of a consortium of national laboratories performing genomic surveillance across four city clusters – Bengaluru, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Pune, a CCMB statement here said on Friday.

The consortium was established four months ago with support from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, and is led by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad. The consortium is focused on upscaling genomic surveillance as part of national efforts led by the INSACOG - Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The consortium intensified its sequencing efforts after the World Health Organization announced Omicron as a Variant of Concern. Such an intensified effort enabled the Bangalore team at the NCBS, a member laboratory of INSACOG, in collaboration with Strand Life Sciences and the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), to detect, rapidly sequence and verify the existence of the omicron variant in samples from two COVID-19 infected individuals. They hope this will aid in a rapid response to contain the spread of variants of concern.

Prof Satyajit Mayor from NCBS conveyed the information to local and national authorities, and the Indian government released a statement on Thursday afternoon, all within four days of receiving the samples.Both SARS-CoV-2 genomes have also been uploaded to the global repository for SARS-CoV-2 sequences, GISAID, so that they can be publicly available to the scientific community.Dr Rakesh Mishra at the CCMB said ‘the consortium is continuously monitoring the situation in all the four cities and has upscaled its efforts to sequence as many samples as possible’.