Genome-wide identification and prediction of SARS-CoV-2 mutations show an abundance of variants: Integrated study of bioinformatics and deep neural learning.

Genomic data analysis is a fundamental system for monitoring pathogen evolution and the outbreak of infectious diseases. Based on bioinformatics and deep learning, this study was designed to identify the genomic variability of SARS-CoV-2 worldwide and predict the impending mutation rate. Analysis of 259044 SARS-CoV-2 isolates identify 3334545 mutations (14.01 mutations per isolate), suggesting a high mutation rate. Strains from India showed the highest no. of mutations (48) followed by Scotland, USA, Netherlands, Norway, and France having up to 36 mutations. Besides the most prominently occurring mutations (D416G, F106F, P314L, and UTR:C241T), we identify L93L, A222V, A199A, V30L, and A220V mutations which are in the top 10 most frequent mutations. Multi-nucleotide mutations GGG>AAC, CC>TT, TG>CA, and AT>TA have come up in our analysis which are in the top 20 mutational cohort. Future mutation rate analysis predicts a 17%, 7%, and 3% increment of C>T, A>G, and A>T, respectively in the future. Conversely, 7%, 7%, and 6% decrement is estimated for T>C, G>A, and G>T mutations, respectively. T>G\A, C>G\A, and A>T\C are not anticipated in the future. Since SARS-CoV-2 is evolving continuously, our findings will facilitate the tracking of mutations and help to map the progression of the COVID-19 intensity worldwide.

Multi-epitope Based Peptide Vaccine Design Using Three Structural Proteins (S, E, and M) of SARS-CoV-2: An In Silico Approach

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the novel coronavirus responsible for the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). No sustainable treatment option is available so far to tackle such a public health threat. Therefore, designing a suitable vaccine to overcome this hurdle asks for immediate attention. In this study, we targeted for a design of multi-epitope based vaccine using immunoinformatics tools. We considered the structural proteins S, E and, M of SARS-CoV-2, since they facilitate the infection of the virus into host cell and using different bioinformatics tools and servers, we predicted multiple B-cell and T-cell epitopes having potential for the required vaccine design. Phylogenetic analysis provided insight on ancestral molecular changes and molecular evolutionary relationship of S, E, and M proteins. Based on the antigenicity and surface accessibility of these proteins, eight epitopes were selected by various B cell and T cell epitope prediction tools. Molecular docking was executed to interpret the binding interactions of these epitopes and three potential epitopes WTAGAAAYY, YVYSRVKNL, and GTITVEELK were selected for their noticeable higher binding affinity scores -9.1, -7.4, and -7.0 kcal/mol, respectively. Targeted epitopes had 91.09% population coverage worldwide. In summary, we identified three epitopes having the most significant properties of designing the peptide-based vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.