Laboratoire Microbiologie Santé et Environnement (LMSE), Doctoral School for Science & Technology, Faculty of Public Health, Lebanese University, Tripoli 1300, Lebanon.
Laboratório de Bioinformática, Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica, Petrópolis, RJ 25651-075, Brazil.
Viruses. 2022 Jul 27;14(8):1640. doi: 10.3390/v14081640.
In the present study, we provide a retrospective genomic surveillance of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Lebanon; we newly sequence the viral genomes of 200 nasopharyngeal samples collected between July 2020 and February 2021 from patients in different regions of Lebanon and from travelers crossing the Lebanese-Syrian border, and we also analyze the Lebanese genomic dataset available at GISAID. Our results show that SARS-CoV-2 infections in Lebanon during this period were shaped by the turnovers of four dominant SARS-CoV-2 lineages, with B.1.398 being the first to thoroughly dominate. Lebanon acted as a dispersal center of B.1.398 to other countries, with intercontinental transmissions being more common than within-continent. Within the country, the district of Tripoli, which was the source of 43% of the total B.1.398 sequences in our study, was identified as being an important source of dispersal in the country. In conclusion, our findings exemplify the butterfly effect, by which a lineage that emerges in a small area can be spread around the world, and highlight the potential role of developing countries in the emergence of new variants.
在本研究中，我们对黎巴嫩的 SARS-CoV-2 大流行进行了回顾性的基因组监测；我们新测序了 200 份 2020 年 7 月至 2021 年 2 月期间来自黎巴嫩不同地区的患者和穿越黎巴嫩-叙利亚边境的旅行者的鼻咽拭子样本中的病毒基因组，并分析了 GISAID 上可用的黎巴嫩基因组数据集。我们的结果表明，在此期间，黎巴嫩的 SARS-CoV-2 感染是由四个主要 SARS-CoV-2 谱系的更替所决定的，其中 B.1.398 首先完全占主导地位。黎巴嫩是 B.1.398 向其他国家传播的扩散中心，洲际传播比洲内传播更为常见。在国内，占我们研究中总 B.1.398 序列 43%的的黎波里地区被确定为国内重要的扩散源。总之，我们的研究结果例证了蝴蝶效应，即一个在小区域出现的谱系可以在全球范围内传播，并强调了发展中国家在新变体出现中的潜在作用。
