Department of Biotechnology, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India.
JH-Institute of Molecular Medicine, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India.
Infect Genet Evol. 2020 Oct;84:104330. doi: 10.1016/j.meegid.2020.104330. Epub 2020 Apr 24.
Considering the current pandemic of COVID-19, it is imperative to gauge the role of molecular divergence in SARS-CoV-2 with time, due to clinical and epidemiological concerns. Our analyses involving molecular phylogenetics is a step toward understanding the transmission clusters that can be correlated to pathophysiology of the disease to gain insight into virulence mechanism. As the infections are increasing rapidly, more divergence is expected followed possibly by viral adaptation. We could identify mutational hotspots which appear to be major drivers of diversity among strains, with RBD of spike protein emerging as the key region involved in interaction with ACE2 and consequently a major determinant of infection outcome. We believe that such molecular analyses correlated with clinical characteristics and host predisposition need to be evaluated at the earliest to understand viral adaptability, disease prognosis, and transmission dynamics.
考虑到当前 COVID-19 大流行，由于临床和流行病学方面的考虑，及时评估 SARS-CoV-2 中分子变异的作用至关重要。我们的分子系统发育分析是了解可与疾病病理生理学相关的传播集群的一个步骤，以便深入了解病毒的毒力机制。随着感染的迅速增加，预计会出现更多的变异，随后可能会发生病毒适应性进化。我们可以识别出突变热点，这些热点似乎是菌株多样性的主要驱动因素，棘突蛋白的 RBD 区域似乎是与 ACE2 相互作用的关键区域，因此是感染结果的主要决定因素。我们认为，需要尽快评估这种与临床特征和宿主易感性相关的分子分析，以了解病毒的适应性、疾病预后和传播动态。
