I did some preliminary anlayses of RBD amino acid variants in GISAID spike sequences. Analyses and figures are very coarse, but I do think they show what we might follow up on as conclusions with better analyses:
Distribution of functional effects of observed RBD mutations is similar to overall DFE, suggesting that the mutants that are seen aren't yet subjected to any strong purifying selection (either because of normal observation that virus tips often have deleterious states even if the trunk is strong, or becuase of the rapid expansion of the virus population which could correspond in theory to a weakening of purifying selectioin)
And related to this, although some affinity-enhancing mutations are available from 1-nt mutations from the WT SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence (including a couple in our proposed validation mut set), they haven't been observed in sequenced isolates, which suggests that there may be no selective benefit for enhanced ACE2 affinity
No need to look over the code and analyses at this point if busy, though at some point we'll want to brainstorm ways to improve the analysis and representation. But I haven't exhausted all of my thought on these points yet, I mainly just wanted to check that this prelim analysis wouldn't alter our priorities for validation muts, and in my interpretation, it does not alter our priorities.
I did some preliminary anlayses of RBD amino acid variants in GISAID spike sequences. Analyses and figures are very coarse, but I do think they show what we might follow up on as conclusions with better analyses:
No need to look over the code and analyses at this point if busy, though at some point we'll want to brainstorm ways to improve the analysis and representation. But I haven't exhausted all of my thought on these points yet, I mainly just wanted to check that this prelim analysis wouldn't alter our priorities for validation muts, and in my interpretation, it does not alter our priorities.