ArticleCell2021
A selective sweep in the Spike gene has driven SARS-CoV-2 human adaptation.
Article in Cell, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed, 108 citations in OpenAlex.
- Allelic gene conversion softens selective sweeps.Genetics · 2026Article
- Structural dynamics and allosteric communication of a SARS-like bat coronavirus spike glycoprotein.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- Altered infectivity, cell-cell fusion, and immune evasion of SARS-CoV-2 BA.3.2 and LP.8.1 variants.Journal of virology · 2026Article
- Global disparities in COVID-19 vaccine coverage associated with trajectories of SARS-CoV-2 adaptation.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Deep mutational scanning of recent SARS-CoV-2 variants highlights changing amino acid preferences within epistatic hotspot residues.PLoS pathogens · 2026Article
- Integrated framework to study genomic surveillance of selective sweeps in multivariants dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The crucial but insufficient role of E2s domain's residues 490 and 492 in determining the host tropism of hepatitis E virus.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Reverse genetics approach for arteriviruses using circular polymerase extension reaction.Access microbiology · 2026Article
- Molecular mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 entry: implications for biomedical strategies.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2025Review
- CX1/BtSY2 and BANAL-20-52 exhibit broader receptor binding and higher affinities to multiple animal ACE2 orthologs than SARS-CoV-2 prototype.Journal of virology · 2025Article
- Near extinction of the HBV quasispecies driven by the hard selective sweep in chronic hepatitis B.mBio · 2025Article
- Deciphering the Code of Viral-Host Adaptation Through Maximum-Entropy Nucleotide Bias Models.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Detecting SARS-CoV-2 cryptic lineages using publicly available whole genome wastewater sequencing data.PLoS pathogens · 2025Article
- Cell binding, uptake, and infection of influenza A virus using recombinant antibody-based receptors.Journal of virology · 2025Article
- The end of the genetic paradigm of cancer.PLoS biology · 2025Review
- The recurrent Spike A222V mutation in SARS-CoV-2 enhances replication in primary deer lung cells.Virus evolution · 2025Article
- Restoring protein glycosylation with GlycoShape.Nature methods · 2024Article
- Distinct pathways for evolution of enhanced receptor binding and cell entry in SARS-like bat coronaviruses.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- Sarbecovirus RBD indels and specific residues dictating multi-species ACE2 adaptiveness.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evolution at Spike protein position 519 in SARS-CoV-2 facilitated adaptation to humans.Npj viruses · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic underscores the need to better understand animal-to-human transmission of coronaviruses and adaptive evolution within new hosts. We scanned more than 182,000 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) genomes for selective sweep signatures and found a distinct footprint of positive selection located around a non-synonymous change (A1114G; T372A) within the spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD), predicted to remove glycosylation and increase binding to human ACE2 (hACE2), the cellular receptor. This change is present in all human SARS-CoV-2 sequences but not in closely related viruses from bats and pangolins. As predicted, T372A RBD bound hACE2 with higher affinity in experimental binding assays. We engineered the reversion mutant (A372T) and found that A372 (wild-type [WT]-SARS-CoV-2) enhanced replication in human lung cells relative to its putative ancestral variant (T372), an effect that was 20 times greater than the well-known D614G mutation. Our findings suggest that this mutation likely contributed to SARS-CoV-2 emergence from animal reservoirs or enabled sustained human-to-human transmission.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.