Strong evidence for the evolution of decreasing compositional heterogeneity in SARS-CoV-2 genomes during the pandemic.

ABSTRACT: The rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during the pandemic was characterized by the fixation of a plethora of mutations, many of which enable the virus to evade host resistance, likely altering the virus' genome compositional structure (i.e., the arrangement of compositional domains of varying lengths and nucleotide frequencies within the genome). To explore this hypothesis, we summarize the evolutionary effects of these mutations by computing the Sequence Compositional Complexity (SCC) in random stratified datasets of fully sequenced genomes. Phylogenetic ridge regression of SCC against time reveals a striking downward evolutionary trend, suggesting the ongoing adaptation of the virus's genome structure to the human host. Other genomic features, such as strand asymmetry, the effective number o

SUBMITTER: Oliver JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11985940 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature