Phylogenicity of B.1.1.7 surface glycoprotein, novel distance function and first report of V90T missense mutation in SARS-CoV-2 surface glycoprotein

Abstract

Phylogenicity of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) B.1.1.7 surface glycoproteins reported from Europe to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) virus database by the mid of April 2021 is analyzed. Novel function for computing phylogenetic distance is proposed for that purpose. Proposed distance function resulted in better-fitted clusters than Jaccard and Sorensen-Dice and accurate evolutionary links were predicted for B.1.1.7 spike variants. Most B.1.1.7 spike variants were linked to their likely direct predecessors at single amino acid change, that in many cases resulted in loss of the key mutations that are associated to the higher B.1.1.7 SARS-CoV-2 infectivity. There were also cases where second mutation was introduced to compensate for the missing mutation. Unreported V90T SARS-CoV-2 surface glycoprotein mutation was also identified, that contributes towards escaping 2–51 neutralizing antibody.