An evolutionary theory on virus mutation in COVID-19
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Updated: Jun 30, 2025

Isolation of Fidelity Variants of RNA Viruses and Characterization of Virus Mutation Frequency
Published on: June 16, 2011
Liaofu Luo1, Jun Lv2
1Faculty of Physical Science and Technology, Inner Mongolia University, 235 West College Road, Hohhot 010021, China.
Abstract:
With the rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2, the emergence of new strains is an intriguing question. This paper presents an evolutionary theory to analyze the mutations of the virus and identify the conditions that lead to the generation of new strains. We represent the virus variants using a 4-letter sequence based on amino acid mutations on the spike protein and employ an n-distance algorithm to derive a variant phylogenetic tree. We show that the theoretically-derived tree aligns with experimental data on virus evolution. Additionally, we propose an A-X model, utilizing the set of existing mutation sites (A) and a set of randomly generated sites (X), to calculate the emergence of new strains. Our findings demonstrate that a sufficient number of random iterations can predict the generation of new macro-lineages when the number of sites in X is large enough. These results provide a crucial theoretical basis for understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.
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