Probing Evolution
Many Strains of Coronavirus Are Out There, but Only One Is Important
Scientists analyzed functions of over 100 distinct SARS-CoV-2 variants — how many strains did they find?
A study published July in the Frontiers of Microbiology, titled “Geographic and Genomic Distribution of SARS-CoV-2 Mutations,” conducted the largest bioinformatics analysis to date. From a total of 48,635 genomes of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from laboratories across the world, the study identified 353,341 mutational events. “Our analysis…confirms a low mutation rate of the virus, with an average of 7.23 mutations per sample with respect to the reference SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences,” the authors remarked.
The most prevailing mutation in this study is D614G, where the amino acid at position 614 changed from D (aspartic acid) to G (glycine); the prior D614 now becomes the G614 variant. Other studies agree that G614 is the dominant variant that represents 75.7% of all circulating SARS-CoV-2 worldwide as of July. For more information about what the D614G mutation means for the pandemic, kindly see here:
