VCOM View Vol 11 No 1

Two VCOM Faculty Members Published in “Cell” Kang and Michalak shared their findings with their colleagues at

L in Kang, PhD, and Pawel Michalak, PhD, both of VCOM-Louisiana, recently published their research about the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in “Cell,” in conjunction with their colleagues from Virginia Tech. SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak. Kang and Michalak applied highly sensitive bioinformatics tools to more than 182,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from a public database. What they discovered from analyzing these genomes was an adaptation to the virus’s Spike protein at an alanine amino acid position, unique to human SARS- CoV-2. This differs from closely- related animal coronaviruses that have a threonine amino acid in this Spike position. This adaptation was centrally located in a “selective sweep” region of the genome and indicated the recent occurrence of strong positive selection, essentially providing genomic evidence of Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection. Armed with the discovery of this new adaptation, Kang and Michalak predicted that the amino acid substitution resulted in increased infectivity and positioning the virus for epidemic potential. Without this modification, they hypothesized, the SARS-CoV-2 virus would not have been able to infect the human population on such a broad scale. ­

“This is a critical scientific study that establishes the likely genetic changes in the SARS CoV-2 virus that allowed it to jump from animals to humans,” said Harold “Skip” Garner, PhD, associate vice provost for research development at VCOM-Virginia. “This establishes an approach for this and potential future pandemic-causing viruses that could allow us to predict detectable changes that could result in the virus becoming more contagious, and open avenues to potentially detect, intercept and mitigate mutating viruses with these changes.” The new paper has been featured on the popular weekly podcast, “TWiEVO: This Week in Evolution,” and in the Wall Street Journal. ■

Virginia Tech, led by James Weger- Lucarelli, PhD, who then took to the lab to test their prediction. Weg­ er-Lucarelli and his team tested the premise by reverting the human version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the alanine amino acid back into its ancestral state, containing the threonine amino acid. In doing so, they found the threonine strain of the virus was significantly less effective within human lung cells compared with the strain containing alanine. This finding confirmed the idea that the mutation allowed for more efficient human-to-human viral transmission and may have been critical to the transition or adaptation of the coronavirus from animal virus to human hosts.

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