Journal of Vaccines & Vaccination

Abstract

Preliminary Estimates of the Mutational Frequencies of Individual Genes in SARS-Cov-2 Genome

Wenfa Ng*

Evolutionary selection pressure or presence of error-prone polymerase in virus would result in emergence of variants that are more infectious or more deadly. But, different genes encode proteins of different functions in the pathogenic process of the virus, and thus, are subjected to different evolutionary selection pressure. This necessarily leads to different mutational frequencies which have implications for the evolution of the virus, and its associated pathogenic potential. This work sought to determine a preliminary estimate of the mutational frequency of each gene in SARSCoV- 2 genome using 10 assembled genomes deposited in European Nucleotide Archive. Results reveal that five genes are commonly mutated. Specifically, these genes are RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, spike protein, ORF3a , ORF8 and nucleocapsid protein. In particular, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase and spike protein have the highest mutational frequency at 90% followed by ORF3a (30%), nucleocapsid protein (20%) and ORF8 protein (10%). Overall, estimating the mutational frequencies of each gene in a virus genome provides critical knowledge for correlating severity of disease with genotype as well as understanding the epidemiological profile of the virus. Such efforts in SARS-CoV-2 conducted in this work has illuminated that spike protein and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase have the highest mutational rate which correlates with publicized frequent emergence of variants of concern in different parts of the world.

Published Date: 2021-11-26; Received Date: 2021-11-05