Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 1, 2025

Production of Pseudotyped Particles to Study Highly Pathogenic Coronaviruses in a Biosafety Level 2 Setting
Published on: March 1, 2019
Synchronized attachment and the Darwinian evolution of coronaviruses CoV-1 and CoV-2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, United States of America.
Abstract:
CoV2019 has evolved to be much more dangerous than CoV2003. Experiments suggest that structural rearrangements dramatically enhance CoV2019 activity. We identify a new first stage of infection that precedes structural rearrangements by using biomolecular evolutionary theory to identify sequence differences enhancing viral attachment rates. We find a small cluster of mutations which show that CoV-2 has a new feature that promotes much stronger viral attachment and enhances contagiousness. The extremely dangerous dynamics of human coronavirus infection is a dramatic example of evolutionary approach of self-organized networks to criticality. It may favor a very successful vaccine. The identified mutations can be used to test the present theory experimentally.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Viral Recombination
Convergent Evolution
Viral Mutations
Synteny and Evolution
Around 80 million years ago, the human and mice lineages diverged from the common ancestor. During the course of evolution, the ancestral...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Eukaryotic Evolution
Contrary to the endosymbiont theory, the eukaryote-first hypothesis proposes that the simpler prokaryotic and...

