The World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020, the second pandemic of the twenty-first century. Expanding virus populations, such as that of SARS-CoV-2, accumulate a number of narrowly shared polymorphisms, imposing a confounding effect on traditional clustering methods. In this context, approaches that reduce the complexity of the sequence space occupied by the SARS-CoV-2 population are necessary for robust clustering. Here, we propose subdividing the global SARS-CoV-2 population into six well-defined subtypes and 10 poorly represented genotypes named tentative subtypes by focusing on the widely shared polymorphisms in nonstructural ( nsp 3, nsp 4, nsp 6, nsp 12, nsp 13 and nsp 14) cistrons and structural ( spike and nucleocapsid ) and accessory ( ORF8 ) genes. The six subtypes and the additional genotypes showed amino acid replacements that might have phenotypic implications. Notably, three mutations (one of them in the Spike protein) were responsible for the geographical segregation of subtypes. We hypothesize that the virus subtypes detected in this study are records of the early stages of SARS-CoV-2 diversification that were randomly sampled to compose the virus populations around the world. The genetic structure determined for the SARS-CoV-2 population provides substantial guidelines for maximizing the effectiveness of trials for testing candidate vaccines or drugs.
【저자키워드】 Evolution, Population genetics, Computational biology and bioinformatics, Genetic variation, Genome informatics, 【초록키워드】 COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, pandemic, Mutation, Trial, Genetic, polymorphism, drugs, virus, Population, Polymorphisms, Protein, ORF8, nucleocapsid, Genotype, Effectiveness, Clustering, early stage, World Health Organization, Subtypes, Implications, sequence, candidate vaccine, phenotypic, subtype, confounding effect, Genes, approach, populations, Randomly, robust, responsible, characterized, provide, reduce, accumulate, the Spike, amino acid replacement, compose, the SARS-CoV-2, 【제목키워드】 SARS-CoV-2, subtype, composed,