Genetic drift of human coronavirus OC43 spike gene during adaptive evolution
By L. Ren, Yue Zhang, Jianguo Li, Yan Xiao, Jing Zhang, Ying Wang, Lan Chen, G. Paranhos-Baccalà, Jianwei Wang. 2015
70 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Coronaviruses (CoVs) continuously threaten human health. However, to date, the evolutionary mechanisms that govern CoV strain persistence in human populations have not been fully understood. In this study, we characterized the evolution of the major antigen-spike (S) gene in the most prevalent human coronavirus (HCoV) OC43 using phylogenetic and phylodynamic analysis. Among the five known HCoV-OC43 genotypes (A to E), higher substitution rates and dN/dS values as well as more positive selection sites were detected in the S gene of genotype D, corresponding to the most dominant HCoV epidemic in recent years. Further analysis showed that the majority of substitutions were located in the S1 subunit. Among them, seven positive selection sites were chronologically traced in the temporal evolution routes of genotype D and six were located around the critical sugar binding region in the N-terminal domain (NTD) of S protein, an important sugar binding domain of CoV. These findings suggest that the genetic drift of the S gene may play an important role in genotype persistence in human populations, providing insights into the mechanisms of HCoV-OC43 adaptive evolution.
Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Infectious Diseases
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In Infectious Diseases
Citations in the corpus
- Epidemiology, Genetic Recombination, and Pathogenesis of Coronaviruses (2016, background): “58 10 substitution rates per site per year [65].”
- Molecular Evolution of Human Coronavirus Genomes (2016, unknown): “A positively selected site was located in the CTD, a region that has unclear function in the HCoVOC43 S protein, as no known protein receptor has been identified to date [61].”
- A human coronavirus evolves antigenically to escape antibody immunity (2020, background): “From a computational perspective, several studies have reported that the spikes of 229E and OC43 evolve under positive selection (Chibo and Birch, 2006; Kistler and Bedford, 2020; Ren et al., 2015), which is often a signature of antigenic evolution.”
- Tracking Changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: Evidence that D614G Increases Infectivity of the COVID-19 Virus (2020, unknown): “Antigenic drift is seen among the common cold coronaviruses OC43 (Ren et al., 2015; Vijgen et al., 2005) and 229E (Chibo and Birch, 2006) and in SARSCoV-1 (Guan et al.”