3- Results
The mean age ± SD of the patients in the present study was 60.42±9.94
years and 57.1% of patients were male. The mean of the white blood cell
count (WBC) and platelets count were 6.97±4.01 X1000 cells/mm³ and
181.4±28.87 X1000 Platelets/mm³, respectively. Furthermore, the
differential WBC indicated that the polymorph nuclear leukocytes (PMN)
and lymphocytes were 75±11.8% and 18±8.9%, respectively. The
investigations of the inflammatory markers were assessed by qualitative
C-reactive protein (CRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR). The
CRP was positive in all patients and the ESR was 33.2±20.4 millimeters
per hour (mm/hr). Also, the sequence analyses were performed on 3 out of
7 cases due to insufficient quality of the rest of the samples.
Obtained sequence was used for multiple sequence alignment (MSA) as
illustrated in Figure 1. The MSA analysis could not show any particular
polymorphism in the assessed regions of all three genes (only nsp-2 is
illustrated in Figure 1). Furthermore, the neighbor joining phylogenetic
analysis showed the highest similarity between Iranian sequences for
nsp-2 and the obtained sequence from Wuhan of Hubei province, China, as
illustrated in Figure 2. Also, the neighbor joining phylogenetic
analysis showed the most similarity for RdRp between Iranian sequences
and those from China and USA (Figure 3). Also, the same results were
observed in the assessment of the S gene (Figure 4). The phylogenetic
assessment indicated that the bat coronaviruses and other SARS-related
bat coronaviruses are highly similar to each other regarding their
ancestors (Figure 5).