The 2019‐new coronavirus epidemic: Evidence for virus evolution
By D. Benvenuto, Marta Giovannetti, Alessandra Ciccozzi, S. Spoto, S. Angeletti, M. Ciccozzi. bioRxiv, 2020
650 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There is concern about a new coronavirus, the 2019-nCoV, as a global public health threat. In this article, we provide a preliminary evolutionary and molecular epidemiological analysis of this new virus. A phylogenetic tree has been built using the 15 available whole genome sequence of 2019-nCoV and 12 whole genome sequences highly similar sequences available in gene bank (5 from SARS, 2 from MERS and 5 from Bat SARS-like Coronavirus). FUBAR analysis shows that the Nucleocapsid and the Spike Glycoprotein has some sites under positive pressure while homology modelling helped to explain some molecular and structural differences between the viruses. The phylogenetic tree showed that 2019.nCoV significantly clustered with Bat SARS-like Coronavirus sequence isolated in 2015, whereas structural analysis revealed mutation in S and nucleocapsid proteins. From these results, 2019nCoV could be considered a coronavirus distinct from SARS virus, probably transmitted from bats or another host where mutations conferred upon it the ability to infect humans.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1eb413cf4d9f7c98a1dffbe80fc9508f9b45674d
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Citations in the corpus
- The SARS-CoV-2 main protease as drug target (2020, neutral): “SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have followed a similar evolutionary transmission cascade.(37,38) The spike glycoprotein (S) plays an important role in host range (tropism) and ‘host jumps’.”
- On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2 (2020, positive): “Several teams have recently confirmed the genetic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and a bat betacoronavirus of the sub-genus Sarbecovirus [8–13].”
- The deadly coronaviruses: The 2003 SARS pandemic and the 2020 novel coronavirus epidemic in China (2020, neutral): “Recently, two mutations of the S protein and N protein SARS-CoV-2 may explain its zoonotic transmission [32] .”
- Olfactory and gustatory dysfunctions as a clinical presentation of mild-to-moderate forms of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19): a multicenter European study (2020, background): “The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19) is an ongoing viral pandemic that emerged from East Asia and quickly spread to the rest of the world [1] .”