PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Qingsheng Huang
AU  - Huan Gao
AU  - Lingling Zheng
AU  - Xiujuan Chen
AU  - Shuai Huang
AU  - Huiying Liang
TI  - Synonymous sites in SARS-CoV-2 genes display trends affecting translational efficiency
AID  - 10.1101/2020.05.30.125740
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.05.30.125740
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/31/2020.05.30.125740.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/31/2020.05.30.125740.full
AB  - A novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has caused a pandemic of COVID-19. The evolutionary trend of the virus genome may have implications for infection control policy but remains obscure. We introduce an estimation of fold change of translational efficiency based on synonymous variant sites to characterize the adaptation of the virus to hosts. The increased translational efficiency of the M and N genes suggests that the population of SARS-CoV-2 benefits from mutations toward favored codons, while the ORF1ab gene has slightly decreased the translational efficiency. In the coding region of the ORF1ab gene upstream of the −1 frameshift site, the decreasing of the translational efficiency has been weakening parallel to the growth of the epidemic, indicating inhibition of synthesis of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase and promotion of replication of the genome. Such an evolutionary trend suggests that multiple infections increased virulence in the absence of social distancing.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.