Is coronaviruses evolving?

Coronaviruses are spherical, enveloped virion particles sixty to two hundred nanometers in diameter with twenty-nanometer-long surface projections resembling ball-topped points of a crown. They are positive-strand ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses with nonsegmented genomes containing roughly thirty thousand nucleotides. Coronaviruses are widespread in the environment and exist in a large range of hosts, including humans, dogs, cats, mice, cattle, swine, turkeys, and chickens, and may also be present in rats and rabbits.

COVID-19 is a viral respiratory illness caused by a new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. The World Health Organization declared the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak a global public health emergency.

This new study is make by acknowledge support from Division of Clinical Microbiology,University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

The Division of Clinical Microbiology,University of Pittsburgh Medical Center performed genetic analyses of eighty-six complete or near-complete genomes of SARS-CoV-2 and revealed many mutations and deletions on coding and non-coding regions. These observations provided evidence of the genetic diversity and rapid evolution of this novel coronavirus.

"The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 raises intriguingquestions such as whether its evolution is driven by mutations"

The article also talk about a genetic analysis discovered three deletions in the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 from Japan(Aichi), USA(Wisconsin), and Australia(Victoria).

"It is interesting that our nucleotide sequence alignment also re-vealed ninety-three mutations over the entire genomes of SARS-CoV-2"

The article is available here.