Infectivity of SARS-CoV-2: there Is Something More than D614G?
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Infectivity of SARS-CoV-2: there Is Something More than D614G? Saathvik R. Kannan 1,2 & Austin N. Spratt 1,3 & Thomas P. Quinn 4 & Xiao Heng 4 & Christian L. Lorson 1,5 & Anders Sönnerborg 6,7 & Siddappa N. Byrareddy 8 & Kamal Singh 1,5,7,9,10 Received: 19 August 2020 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARSCoV-2), causative agent of Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID19), has spread throughout the world since its first emergence in Dec. 2019 in Wuhan, China. As anticipated, SARS-CoV-2 evolution is most likely through selection, perhaps conferring enhanced fitness and/or infectivity. Numerous reports detail the molecular identification of D614G mutation in Spike protein (S-protein) (Korber et al. 2020; Koyama et al. 2020; Maitra et al. 2020) and are experimentally characterizing the functional impact upon the viral life cycle (Li et al. 2020; Luthy and Kistler 1989). Regardless of how D614G arose, it is clear that this variant has a distinct phenotype. With the report of D614G, it was hypothesized that viruses containing G614 were more infectious than D614 viruses (Grubaugh et al. 2020; Korber et al. 2020). Experimental evidence quickly confirmed this hypothesis (Korber et al. 2020; Li et al. 2020). However, a report from COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium(Report #9 - 25th June 2020) showed G614 virus has grown 1.22 times faster than the D614, but the statistical
significance was low, indicating the role of other factors such as mutations in other genes. To gain insight into the distribution of mutations in SARSCoV-2 nonstructural proteins (nsps) and structural proteins, we analyzed protein sequences (n = 7232) from the United States (n = 6302), Europe (n = 420), China (n = 104), and India (n = 406), and determined the mutations with respect to Wuhan-Hu-1 isolate (NCBI Reference Sequence: NC_045512.2). A Circos diagram show ing nonsynonymous mutations in select viral proteins (nsp8, nsp12, nsp13, nsp14, and S-protein) is shown in Fig. 1a. SARS-CoV2 has evolved by developing mutations in different viral proteins. While mutations in 5 proteins is shown in Fig. 1a, mutations in other viral proteins were also identified in this analysis. The data also revealed that some mutations were widespread, while other mutations appeared to be restricted geographically. Most strikingly, mutation P323L in nsp12 (an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase or RdRp) and D614G in S-protein co-evolved throughout the world. Other mutations,
Saathvik R. Kannan and Austin N. Spratt contributed equally to this work. * Anders Sönnerborg [email protected] * Siddappa N. Byrareddy [email protected] * Kamal Singh [email protected] 1
Bond Life Sciences Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
2
Hickman High School, Columbia, MO 65203, USA
3
Department of Mathematics, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
4
Department of Biochemistry, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
5
Dep
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