Tracking cytosine depletion in SARS-CoV-2

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Abstract

Motivation

Danchin et al. have pointed out that cytosine drives the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. A depletion of cytosine might lead to the attenuation of SARS-CoV-2.

Results

We built a website to track the composition change of mono-, di-, and tri-nucleotide of SARS-CoV-2 over time. The website downloads new strains available from GISAID and updates its results daily. Our analysis suggests that the composition of cytosine in coronaviruses is related to their reported mortality. Using 137,315 SARS-CoV-2 strains collected in ten months, we observed cytosine depletion at a rate of about one cytosine loss per month from the whole genome.

Availability

The website is available at http://www.bio8.cs.hku.hk/sarscov2/ .

Contact

rbluo@cs.hku.hk

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.26.354787: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    For every full genome, use aligned it against the reference using MAFFT (Katoh and Standley, 2013).
    MAFFT
    suggested: (MAFFT, RRID:SCR_011811)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.


    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.


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