Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness
April 13, 2020
Insights on early mutational events in SARS-CoV-2 virus reveal founder effects across geographical regions
Category: Article Summary
Topic: Testing and Treatment
- Farkas et al described early mutational events across samples from publicly available SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the archive repository. Five-point mutations with clonal (founder) effect were found in USA sequencing samples, but the Australian mutation signatures were more diverse than USA samples. Mutations in the helicase and orf1a coding regions were predominant, suggesting that these proteins are prone to evolve by natural selection. They firmly urge primer sets for diagnosis be carefully designed, since rapidly occurring variants would affect the performance of the RT-qPCR based viral testing.
Farkas et al. (April 12, 2020). Insights on early mutational events in SARS-CoV-2 virus reveal founder effects across geographical regions. Pre-print downloaded Apr 13 from