Intra-Host SARS-CoV-2 Single-Nucleotide Variants Emerged During the Early Stage of COVID-19 Pandemic Forecast Population Fixing Mutations

    January 2022 in “ Journal of Infection ”
    Yi Zhang, Ning Jiang, Weiqiang Qi, Tao Li, Yumeng Zhang, Haocheng Zhang, Jing Wu, Zhaoqin Zhu, Jingwen Ai, Chao Qiu, Wenhong Zhang
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    TLDR Some early COVID-19 mutations in patients predicted future common virus mutations.
    The research examined the use of intra-host single-nucleotide variant variants (iSNVs) to predict mutations that could become fixed in the population during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study involved 63 COVID-19 patients and identified 836 iSNV sites from 61 patients' specimens. As of November 8th, 2021, 99.16% of these iSNVs were found as fixed single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in sequences from global laboratories. 29 of these iSNVs increased in frequency and became consensus variants worldwide. The study concluded that monitoring iSNVs could help in tracking variants and predicting future immune-escape variants.
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