Clin Infect Dis . Emergence of a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 virus variant with novel genomic architecture in Hong Kong

[tetano]

Clin Infect Dis


. 2021 Mar 2;ciab198.
doi: 10.1093/cid/ciab198. Online ahead of print.
Emergence of a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 virus variant with novel genomic architecture in Hong Kong


Herman Tse ¹ , David Christopher Lung ^{1 2} , Sally Cheuk-Ying Wong ¹ , Ka-Fai Ip ¹ , Tak-Chiu Wu ³ , Kelvin Kai-Wang To ^{4 5} , Kin-Hang Kok ^{4 5} , Kwok-Yung Yuen ^{4 5} , Garnet Kwan-Yue Choi ¹



Affiliations

• PMID: 33675655
• DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciab198

Abstract

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, divergent SARS-CoV-2 lineages have emerged continuously, mostly through the genomic accumulation of substitutions. We report the discovery of a SARS-CoV-2 variant with a novel genomic architecture characterized by absent ORF7a, ORF7b and ORF8, and a C-terminally modified ORF6 product resulting from partial 5'-UTR duplication and transposition.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; genomic rearrangement; whole-genome sequencing.