Integrating Fr\'echet distance and AI reveals the evolutionary trajectory and origin of SARS-CoV-2

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel alignment-free method combining Fréchet distance and AI to trace SARS-CoV-2's evolution and origin, revealing key mutational features and pathways from various animals to humans.

Contribution

It develops a new algorithm for assessing genome evolution without alignment, integrating it with neural networks to elucidate SARS-CoV-2's evolutionary trajectory and origin.

Findings

SARS-CoV-2 evolution shortens its genome to increase infectivity.

Mutating specific features like TTA and GCT boosts infectious potential.

Origin traced from mink to humans through multiple intermediate hosts.

Abstract

A genome, composed of a precisely ordered sequence of four nucleotides (ATCG), encompasses a multitude of specific genome features like AAA motif. Mutations occurring within a genome disrupt the sequential order and composition of these features, thereby influencing the evolutionary trajectories and yielding variants. The evolutionary relatedness between a variant and its ancestor can be estimated by assessing evolutionary distances across a spectrum of genome features. This study develops a novel, alignment-free algorithm that considers both the sequential order and composition of genome features, enabling computation of the Fr\'echet distance (Fr) across multiple genome features to quantify the evolutionary status of a variant. Integrating this algorithm with an artificial recurrent neural network (RNN) reveals the quantitative evolutionary trajectory and origin of SARS-CoV-2, a puzzle unsolved by alignment-based phylogenetics. The RNN generates the evolutionary trajectory from Fr data at two levels: genome sequence mutations and organism variants. At the genome sequence level, SARS-CoV-2 evolutionarily shortens its genome to enhance its infectious capacity. Mutating signature features, such as TTA and GCT, increases its infectious potential and drives its evolution. At the organism level, variants mutating a single biomarker possess low infectious potential. However, mutating multiple markers dramatically increases their infectious capacity, propelling the COVID-19 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 likely originates from mink coronavirus variants, with its origin trajectory traced as follows: mink, cat, tiger, mouse, hamster, dog, lion, gorilla, leopard, bat, and pangolin. Together, mutating multiple signature features and biomarkers delineates the evolutionary trajectory of mink-origin SARS-CoV-2, leading to the COVID-19 pandemic. Full text and detailed on https://combai.org/ai/covidgenome/