Point mutation of COVID-19 proteins: A study on noval corona virus (nCov) correlation with MERS and H1N1 viruses and in silico investigation of nCoV proteins for future applications

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID 19) which is caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. The disease transformed to a pandemic and affected people’s lives all over the world. It caused death to millions of people all over the world. In this project we focused on finding out the correlation of SARS-CoV2 with other respiratory diseases causing viruses like MERS and H1N1 influenza viruses. We further investigated to understand the mutations that occur in the sequences of the SARS-CoV2 during the spread of the disease and correlated it with the functional domains of proteins. The resulted phylogenetic tree indicated that SARS-CoV2 is closely related to the MERS and H1N1 viruses are distantly related. The mutation analysis of 10 different proteins of the SARS-CoV2 shows that there were more than 50 point-mutations among 34 countries sequences for six proteins. Interestingly, four proteins did not any mutation during the analysis. Therefore, these four proteins may be taken into consideration during the development of the diagnostics or therapeutics against this disease.