The 2019‐new coronavirus epidemic: Evidence for virus evolution

Abstract

There is a worldwide concern about the new coronavirus 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 sequences of 2019-nCoV, 12 whole genome sequences of 2019-nCoV, and 12 highly similar whole genome sequences available in gene bank (five from the severe acute respiratory syndrome, two from Middle East respiratory syndrome, and five from bat SARS-like coronavirus). Fast unconstrained Bayesian approximation analysis shows that the nucleocapsid and the spike glycoprotein have some sites under positive pressure, whereas homology modeling revealed some molecular and structural differences between the viruses.

The deadly coronaviruses: The 2003 SARS pandemic and the 2020 novel coronavirus epidemic in China

“…Such changes thus have the potential to lead to variants that have high pathogenic potential when transmitted to humans [29][30][31]. Recently, two mutations of the S protein and N protein SARS-CoV-2 may explain its zoonotic transmission [32]. Genomic alignment of 54 SARS-CoV-2 genomes identified two hotspots of hypervariability at positions 8789 (synonymous variant) and 28,151(Ser/ Leu change), located in the polyprotein and ORF8 genes respectively [33].…”

Insights into the Recent 2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in Light of Past Human Coronavirus Outbreaks

“…The previous findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus that is distinct from SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV but most probably originated in bats, similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV [42]. Another recent study confirmed that SARS-CoV-2 significantly clustered with a sequence from the bat SARS-like CoV that was isolated in 2015 [76]. However, the existence of an intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 is still not verified (Figure 2).…”

Recent progress in understanding 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) associated with human respiratory disease: detection, mechanisms and treatment

“…Phylogenetic analysis of the complete viral genome revealed that the coronavirus was most closely related (89.1% nucleotide similarity) to a group of SARS-like coronaviruses previously sampled from bats in China. Benvenuto et al built a phylogenetic tree in-cluding the whole-genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 and highly similar available whole-genome sequences in GenBank [9] . The phylogenetic tree showed that SARS-CoV-2 clustered with a bat SARS-like coronavirus sequence isolated in 2015, whilst fast unconstrained Bayesian approximation (FUBAR) analysis revealed mutations in the spike glycoprotein and nucleocapsid protein.…”