Article
Version 2
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
An Evolutionary Theory on Virus Mutation in COVID-19
Version 1
: Received: 23 December 2023 / Approved: 25 December 2023 / Online: 26 December 2023 (09:58:56 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 23 March 2024 / Approved: 25 March 2024 / Online: 26 March 2024 (11:33:54 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 23 March 2024 / Approved: 25 March 2024 / Online: 26 March 2024 (11:33:54 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Luo, L., & Lv, J. (2024). An evolutionary theory on virus mutation in COVID-19. Virus Research, 344, 199358. Luo, L., & Lv, J. (2024). An evolutionary theory on virus mutation in COVID-19. Virus Research, 344, 199358.
Abstract
With the rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2, the emergence of new strains is an intriguing question. This paper presents an evolutionary theory to analyze the mutations of the virus and identify the conditions that lead to the generation of new strains. We represent the virus variants using a 4-letter sequence based on amino acid mutations on the spike protein and employ an n-distance algorithm to derive a variant phylogenetic tree. We show that the theoretically-derived tree aligns with experimental data on virus evolution. Additionally, we propose an A-X model, utilizing the set of existing mutation sites (A) and a set of randomly generated sites (X), to calculate the emergence of new strains. Our findings demonstrate that a sufficient number of random iterations can predict the generation of new macro-lineages when the number of sites in X is large enough. These results provide a crucial theoretical basis for understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.
Keywords
COVID-19; spike protein; virus mutation; evolutionary theory
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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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