Exploring the Relationship Between Dominant Variant Emergence and Sequence Divergence Throughout the Sars-COV2 (COVID-19) Pandemic

Abstract: 

Viruses have a unique evolutionary landscape as they compete with one another and jump to different hosts. This is an understudied area of research, but due to the ongoing pandemic and the widely available sequence data there are new possibilities for understanding how viral genome evolution occurs. This study focuses on how novel variants of COVID-19 demonstrate viral sequence divergence throughout the global pandemic. The research compares and contrasts key dominant variants such as Alpha, Delta, Omicron BA.1, and Omicron XXB with the original Wuhan strain of COVID-19. The results of the comparison between the RNA nucleotides in the different variants were analyzed to determine whether some variants became dominant due to evolution, natural selection, or mutation. The results show that the variant strains all diverged and became dominant from the original Wuhan strain. However, there was no significant pattern to account for variant strain lineages becoming dominant in non-sequential order. These results indicate that natural selection is a strong driving force for viral genome evolution.