Asymptomatic Phase and Convergent Evolution of Coronavirus

TL;DR

This paper investigates the early asymptomatic phase and convergent evolution of coronavirus, identifying key mutations that enhance viral attachment and contagiousness, with implications for vaccine development and understanding viral evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a biomolecular evolutionary theory to identify mutations that increase infectivity and explains the convergent evolution of highly contagious coronavirus strains.

Findings

Identification of four mutations promoting stronger viral attachment

The theory explains increased contagiousness in newer strains

Mutations can be tested experimentally for vaccine development

Abstract

CoV2019 has evolved to be much more dangerous than CoV2003. Experiments suggest that structural rearrangements dramatically enhance CoV2019 activity. We identify a new first stage of infection that precedes structural rearrangements by using biomolecular evolutionary theory to identify sequence differences enhancing viral attachment rates. We find a small cluster of four single mutations which show that CoV-2 has a new feature that promotes much stronger viral attachment and enhances contagiousness. The extremely dangerous dynamics of human coronavirus infection is a dramatic example of evolutionary approach of self-organized networks to criticality. It may favor a very successful vaccine. The identified mutations can be used to test the present theory experimentally. The theory also works well for the newer strains and explains their increased contagiousness.