Ubiquitous Forbidden Order in R-group classified protein sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses

Pratibha,; Shaju, C.; Kamal,

Each amino acid in a polypeptide chain has a distinctive R-group associated with it. We report here a novel method of species characterization based upon the order of these R-group classified amino acids in the linear sequence of the side chains associated with the codon triplets. In an otherwise pseudo-random sequence, we search for forbidden combinations of kth order. We applied this method to analyze the available protein sequences of various viruses including SARS-CoV-2. We found that these ubiquitous forbidden orders (UFO) are unique to each of the viruses we analyzed. This unique structure of the viruses may provide an insight into viruses’ chemical behavior and the folding patterns of the proteins. This finding may have a broad significance for the analysis of coding sequences of species in general.