Epidemiological associations with genomic variation in SARS-CoV-2.

Published in Scientific Reports, 2021

Recommended citation: Rahnavard, A., Dawson, T., Clement, R. et al. (2021). Epidemiological associations with genomic variation in SARS-CoV-2. Sci Rep 11, 23023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02548-w.

Genomic variation has also been shown to be informative in terms of tracking the spread of the virus and identifying major clades related to different variants of SARS-CoV-2 with different epidemiological features. However, our ability to effectively link genomic variation in viruses to epidemiological information is hindered by analytical limitations in current methodologies to test such associations. Here we apply our novel multi-resolution clustering approach for identifying variable CoV genomic regions and linking these regions to epidemiological factors. We apply a coherence metric to quantify and compare phylogenetic divergence of CoV genomes within locations to the divergence of CoV between locations. Our results have direct public health applicability, and the underlying methodology is robust to any collection of genomic features and epidemiological data.

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Recommended citation: Rahnavard, A., Dawson, T., Clement, R. et al. (2021). Epidemiological associations with genomic variation in SARS-CoV-2. Sci Rep 11, 23023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02548-w.