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. 2016 Feb;22(2):327-30.
doi: 10.3201/eid2202.151700.

Microevolution of Outbreak-Associated Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, South Korea, 2015

Moon-Woo Seong, So Yeon Kim, Victor Max Corman, Taek Soo Kim, Sung Im Cho, Man Jin Kim, Seung Jun Lee, Jee-Soo Lee, Soo Hyun Seo, Ji Soo Ahn, Byeong Su Yu, Nare Park, Myoung-don Oh, Wan Beom Park, Ji Yeon Lee, Gayeon Kim, Joon Sung Joh, Ina Jeong, Eui Chong Kim, Christian Drosten, Sung Sup Park

Microevolution of Outbreak-Associated Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, South Korea, 2015

Moon-Woo Seong et al. Emerg Infect Dis. 2016 Feb.

Abstract

During the 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak in South Korea, we sequenced full viral genomes of strains isolated from 4 patients early and late during infection. Patients represented at least 4 generations of transmission. We found no evidence of changes in the evolutionary rate and no reason to suspect adaptive changes in viral proteins.

Keywords: MERS-CoV; Middle East respiratory syndrome; South Korea; coronavirus; genome sequencing; microevolution; outbreak; phylogenetic analysis; respiratory infections; viruses.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Transmission tree timeline for 8 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus strains isolated during an outbreak in South Korea, 2015. Numbers without parentheses indicate patients in this study; numbers inside parentheses indicate patients not included in this study. The index case-patient is represented by (1). Numbers 1 and 2 following patient identification numbers indicate separate samples that were sequenced. The left edge of each shaded box indicates date of symptom onset for that patient; solid black vertical lines indicate sampling dates. Dashed vertical line indicates transmission from patient 14 to patient 76; (?) indicates unknown source of infection.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Location of the 13 variant nucleotide positions identified in genomes of 8 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus strains isolated during an outbreak in South Korea, 2015. Case-patient numbers are indicated on the left, as are GenBank accession numbers for 2 related strains. For each case, the top and bottom horizontal bars represent the genome sequence generated from the first and second samples, respectively. Letters indicate matching nucleotide positions between samples. Sample collection dates are shown in Table 1. E, small envelope gene; M, matrix gene; N, nucleocapsid gene; ORF, open reading frame.
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