Variants in Saudi Arabian SARS-Cov-2 Genome; Causes and Similarity to Wuhan hCoV-19/Wuhan/WIV04/2019

EasyChair Preprint 9059

Abstract

In addition to SARS-Cov-2, Saudi Arabia have already experienced similar sever Beta-coronavirus outbreak in 2003 and 2012. Like SARS and MERS-CoV, SARS-Cov-2 begins with a minor upper respiratory injury and progresses to serious respiratory illness. Infectious viruses, including SARS-Cov-2, use different strategies such as mutations which alter the virus phenotype in a way that confers its fitness advantage. These mutations play critical roles in establishing successful entry of the virus into its host cell. By the present study, and using a group of bioinformatics tools, we have analysed the genomic variation in a 53 SARS-CoV-2 strains recorded in Saudi Arabia and compared to Wuhan strain hCoV-19/Wuhan/WIV04/2019. A significant population expansion of SARS-CoV-2 transmission was recorded (Tajima’s D=-2.486, P<0.001; Fu'sFs=-4.658, P<0.001). In total, 147 polymorphic sites were detected within the 11 genes. Among them, there were 110 singleton variable sites and 37 parsimony informative sites. The changes in the evolutionary relationship between the 53 Saudi SARS-CoV19 variants, reflects that the analysed genotypes were clustered at different groups compared to Wuhan strain hCoV-19/Wuhan/WIV04/2019. Indeed, the recorded amino acids changes (aa) were with highest percentage on ORF1ab region (52 %), followed by the spike, nucleocapsid and finely the envelop (42%, 38% and 25 % respectively). These are the most common sites undergoing to an aa change, providing an insight of some important proteins of the COVID‐2019 that are involved in the mechanism of viral entry and viral replication. Thus, understanding the main drivers for pathogen appearance, spreading, and supremacy on human defences is highly required as these mutations may adversely affect all efforts of drug repurposing.

Keyphrases: Amino Acid (aa), Haplotype, Mutations, SARS-CoV-2, Saudi Arabia

@booklet{EasyChair:9059,
  author    = {A. Khuzaim Alzahrani},
  title     = {Variants in Saudi Arabian SARS-Cov-2 Genome; Causes and Similarity to Wuhan hCoV-19/Wuhan/WIV04/2019},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9059},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}