Virology: Current Research

University Toronto Health Network, Toronto General Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Publications

• Research Article   
  Implications of Haplotype Switching for the Origin and Global Spread of COVID-19
  Author(s): Edward J. Steele*, Reginald M. Gorczynski, Herbert Rebhan, Patrick Carnegie, Robert Temple, Gensuke Tokoro, Alexander Kondakov, Stephen G. Coulson, Dayal T. Wickramasinghe and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe*
  
  When analysed in patients at epicentres of outbreaks over the first three months of the 2020 pandemic, the virus responsible for COVID-19 cannot be classed as a rapidly mutating virus. It employs a haplotype-switching strategy most likely driven by APOBEC and ADAR cytosine and adenosine deamination events (C>U, A>I) at key selected sites in the ~ 30,000 nt positive sense single-stranded RNA genome (Steele and Lindley 2020). Quite early on (China, through Jan 2020) the main haplotype was L with a minor proportion of the S haplotype. By the time of the explosive outbreaks in New York City (mid-to late-March 2020) the haplotype variants expanded to at least 13. The COVID-19 genomes analysed at the main sites of exponential increases in cases and deaths over a 2 week time period (explosive epicentres) such as Wuhan and New York City showed limited mutation per se of t.. Read More»
  DOI: 10.37421/vcrh.2020.4.135

  Abstract HTML PDF