New Paper (Other): Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans

[marouenbg]

Title: Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans

General Information

Please paste a link to the paper or a citation here:

Link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/172

What is the paper's Manubot-style citation?

Citation: @doi:10.1126/science.abe5901

Is this paper primarily relevant to Background or Pathogenesis?

• [ ] Background
• [x] Pathogenesis
• [ ] Methods

Please list some keywords (3-10) that help identify the relevance of this paper to COVID-19

• keyword 1 (replace me, copy and paste more than three if needed)
• keyword 2 (replace me, copy and paste more than three if needed)
• keyword 3 (replace me, copy and paste more than three if needed)

Please note the publication / review status

• [ ] Pre-print
• [x] New Peer-Reviewed Paper
• [ ] Peer-Reviewed Paper Pre-2020

Which areas of expertise are particularly relevant to the paper?

• [ ] virology
• [ ] epidemiology
• [ ] biostatistics
• [x] immunology
• [ ] pharmacology
• [ ] other:

[marouenbg]

Summary

Suggested questions to answer about each paper:

• What did they analyze? The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to new animal reservoirs and back to humans.

• What methods did they use? Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) of SARS-CoV-2 variants in mink farms. They analyzed the samples taken from mink, and from the workers in those farms.

• Does this paper study COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, or a related disease and/or virus? This paper studies the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from human to mink and back to human with a new variant.

• What is the main finding (or a few main takeaways)? This paper describes the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in mink farms and the mutational landscape of the variants detected in mink. Besides the biological findings, the technical novelty of the paper is the use of WGS in the surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

• What does this paper tell us about the background and/or diagnostics/therapeutics for COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2? This paper tells us that SARS-CoV-2 can acquire new hosts through human, in mink farms in particular. It can evolve in the new hosts, acquire new mutations and is transmitted back to humans.

• Do you have any concerns about methodology or the interpretation of these results beyond this analysis? None.

Any comments or notes?

776 suggested that SARS-CoV-2 could have acquired a mutation in mink farms. This mutation has a higher affinity towards mink ACE2.