Phylogenetic Analysis of the Novel Coronavirus Reveals Important Variants in Indian Strains

Aditi Joshi; Sushmita Paul

. CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.041301 doi: bioRxiv preprint might have infected multiple times. This same infected person has another notable 196 change of three consecutive positions (28881G>A, 28882G>A, and 28883G>C) 197 reported mainly in the US. To an extent it clears the doubt that person might have 198 contracted multiple strains (Asian and American), thereby carrying both S and L types 199 of strain along with the US reported mutation. L-type was found to be more aggressive 200 strain before Jan 2020 [17] . People who might have contracted this patient would have 201 been at higher risk of infection. In phylogenetic tree analysis these two strains could be 202 observed without branching from the ancestral strain and in vicinity to reference strain 203 sequence (NC 045512) Figure 2 . tourists (Sample 5 to Sample 9), the person (Sample 4) who had contracted with Italian 220 tourist and 6 (Sample 11 to Sample 16) of the Vero CCL81 isolate P1 sequenced in India. 221 It seems to be absent in the strain sequenced from patient with travel history to Italy. 222 One probable explanation to this novel non-synonymous change could be related to 223 its increased transmission rate since it is being observed to be incorporated in 224 combination with already co-existing mutations [20] . The mutation was predicted with 225 stabilising effect, hence no change at secondary structure level was observed Figure 3 .