Within-Host Diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 Patients With Variable Disease Severities.
التاريخ
2020-10-06المؤلف
Al Khatib, Hebah ABenslimane, Fatiha M
Elbashir, Israa E
Coyle, Peter V
Al Maslamani, Muna A
Al-Khal, Abdullatif
Al Thani, Asmaa A
Yassine, Hadi M
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البيانات الوصفية
عرض كامل للتسجيلةالملخص
The ongoing pandemic of SARS-COV-2 has already infected more than eight million people worldwide. The majority of COVID-19 patients either are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. Yet, about 15% of the cases experience severe complications and require intensive care. Factors determining disease severity are not yet fully characterized. Here, we investigated the within-host virus diversity in COVID-19 patients with different clinical manifestations. We compared SARS-COV-2 genetic diversity in 19 mild and 27 severe cases. Viral RNA was extracted from nasopharyngeal samples and sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform. This was followed by deep-sequencing analyses of SARS-CoV-2 genomes at both consensus and sub-consensus sequence levels. Consensus sequences of all viruses were very similar, showing more than 99.8% sequence identity regardless of the disease severity. However, the sub-consensus analysis revealed significant differences in within-host diversity between mild and severe cases. Patients with severe symptoms exhibited a significantly (-value 0.001) higher number of variants in coding and non-coding regions compared to mild cases. Analysis also revealed higher prevalence of some variants among severe cases. Most importantly, severe cases exhibited significantly higher within-host diversity (mean = 13) compared to mild cases (mean = 6). Further, higher within-host diversity was observed in patients above the age of 60 compared to the younger age group. These observations provided evidence that within-host diversity might play a role in the development of severe disease outcomes in COVID-19 patients; however, further investigations are required to elucidate this association.
المجموعات
- الأبحاث [727 items ]
- أبحاث فيروس كورونا المستجد (كوفيد-19) [811 items ]