Highly Recurrent Multinucleotide Mutations in SARS-CoV-2.

ABSTRACT: Multinucleotide mutations simultaneously replace multiple nucleotides. They are a significant contributor to evolution and disease, as well as to misdiagnosis, misannotation and other biases in genome data analysis. Multinucleotide mutations are generally thought to be rare and random events. However, by processing over 2 million publicly shared genomes, we show that certain multinucleotide mutations are highly recurrent in SARS-CoV-2: they repeatedly and consistently modify the same multiple nucleotides at the same genome position in the same way. The most frequent of these multinucleotide mutations have independently occurred hundreds of times across all SARS-CoV-2 lineages. We find evidence that the vast majority of these recurrent multinucleotide mutations (14 out of 15, corresponding

SUBMITTER: De Maio N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12619124 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature