Nels Elde - April 14, 2021

Nels Elde, PhD, Associate Professor of Human Genetics, The University of Utah, Recombination-driven coronavirus evolution

The SARS-CoV2, one kind of coronavirus, causes severe consequences to human health and societal impacts. How can the virus infect humans across the species, escape the immunity of hosts, and survive? One mechanism is the genetic recombination to diverge the virus lineages and overcome evolutional selection. Dr. Elde’s group analyzed the genetic recombination dynamics of three groups of coronaviruses, SARSr-CoV, betacoronavirus-1, and SADSr-CoV, by using a self-developed open-source computational workflow, IDPlot. They found that the robust recombination between those viruses made many unknown coronavirus lineages and enriched the coronavirus pool's genetic diversity. The vital recombination could occur during co-infection of viruses and indicate that broader virus sampling and more efforts are necessary to reveal the extensive and genetically divergent coronavirus family and predict future zoonotic events.