Article ; Online: Flexible, Functional, and Familiar
Frontiers in Microbiology, Vol
Characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Evolution
2020 Volume 11
Abstract: The SARS-CoV-2 S protein is a major point of interaction between the virus and the human immune system. As a consequence, the S protein is not a static target but undergoes rapid molecular evolution. In order to more fully understand the selection ... ...
| Abstract | The SARS-CoV-2 S protein is a major point of interaction between the virus and the human immune system. As a consequence, the S protein is not a static target but undergoes rapid molecular evolution. In order to more fully understand the selection pressure during evolution, we examined residue positions in the S protein that vary greatly across closely related viruses but are conserved in the subset of viruses that infect humans. These “evolutionarily important” residues were not distributed evenly across the S protein but were concentrated in two domains: the N-terminal domain and the receptor-binding domain, both of which play a role in host cell binding in a number of related viruses. In addition to being localized in these two domains, evolutionary importance correlated with structural flexibility and inversely correlated with distance from known or predicted host receptor-binding residues. Finally, we observed a bias in the composition of the amino acids that make up such residues toward more human-like, rather than virus-like, sequence motifs. |
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| Keywords | flexibility ; host like ; molecular evolution ; phylogenetics ; SARS-CoV-2 ; spike protein ; Microbiology ; QR1-502 ; covid19 |
| Subject code | 572 |
| Language | English |
| Publishing date | 2020-09-01T00:00:00Z |
| Publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
| Document type | Article ; Online |
| Database | BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (life sciences selection) |
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