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Mutation Profile of Over 4,500 SARS-CoV-2 Isolations Reveals Prevalent Cytosine-to-Uridine Deamination on Viral RNAs
Version 1
: Received: 17 April 2020 / Approved: 19 April 2020 / Online: 19 April 2020 (07:05:58 CEST)
How to cite: Jiang, W. Mutation Profile of Over 4,500 SARS-CoV-2 Isolations Reveals Prevalent Cytosine-to-Uridine Deamination on Viral RNAs. Preprints 2020, 2020040335 Jiang, W. Mutation Profile of Over 4,500 SARS-CoV-2 Isolations Reveals Prevalent Cytosine-to-Uridine Deamination on Viral RNAs. Preprints 2020, 2020040335
Abstract
Aims: The sequencing data of SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2) are rapidly emerging. The mutation profile across SARS-CoV-2 populations is an important inference of the evolution of coronaviruses. Materials & Methods: With 4,521 lines of SARS-CoV-2, we obtained 3,169 unique point mutation sites in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. We counted the numbers and calculated the MAF (minor allele frequency) of each mutation type. Results: Nearly half of the point mutations are C-T mismatches and 20% are A-G mismatches. The MAF of C-T and A-G mismatches is significantly higher than MAF of other mutation types. Conclusions: The excessive C-T mismatches do not resemble the random mutation profile, and are likely to be explained by the cytosine-to-uridine deamination system in hosts. Not only the population analyses in previous studies are questionable, but also the 17% divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 could be erroneous due to the deamination.
Subject Areas
SARS-CoV-2; 4521 lines; mutations; MAF (minor allele frequency); deamination
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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