Back

Evidence of the Recombinant Origin and Ongoing Mutations in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome 2 (SARS-COV-2)

Huang, J.-M.; Jan, S. S.; Wei, X.; Wan, Y.; Ouyang, S.

2020-03-17 microbiology
10.1101/2020.03.16.993816 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The recent global outbreak of viral pneumonia designated as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has threatened global public health and urged to investigate its source. Whole genome analysis of SARS-CoV-2 revealed ~96% genomic similarity with bat CoV (RaTG13) and clustered together in phylogenetic tree. Furthermore, RaTGl3 also showed 97.43% spike protein similarity with SARS-CoV-2 suggesting that RaTGl3 is the closest strain. However, RBD and key amino acid residues supposed to be crucial for human-to-human and cross-species transmission are homologues between SARS-CoV-2 and pangolin CoVs. These results from our analysis suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is a recombinant virus of bat and pangolin CoVs. Moreover, this study also reports mutations in coding regions of 125 SARS-CoV-2 genomes signifying its aptitude for evolution. In short, our findings propose that homologous recombination has been occurred between bat and pangolin CoVs that triggered cross-species transmission and emergence of SARS-CoV-2, and, during the ongoing outbreak, SARS-CoV-2 is still evolving for its adaptability.

Matching journals

The top 10 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.