New Delhi: Indian scientists missed the race to sequence the virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), but they have scored a major victory by discovering three new genes of the virus - a step that should help speed up development of drugs or vaccine against the deadly disease that is feared to be reappearing.

The discovery has been made by researchers at the New Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), the youngest laboratory under Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). They achieved the feat by using patented computational tools that they have developed for gene prediction and functional analysis.

SARS originated in China in November 2002, infected 8,000 and killed 774 people worldwide. With a remarkable speed, scientists around the world sequenced the complete genome (or DNA) of several strains of SARS in the hope of developing a vaccine. But an effective vaccine is yet to be tested.

Indian scientists could not play a role in sequencing the SARS genome because they did not have access to the virus. However, availability of complete DNA sequence of SARS virus in the public domain provided them the opportunity for identification of protein coding genes using a novel gene prediction method called "Gene Decipher" developed at IGIB.