Communications Biology (Jul 2022)

Altered subgenomic RNA abundance provides unique insight into SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7/Alpha variant infections

  • Matthew D. Parker,
  • Hazel Stewart,
  • Ola M. Shehata,
  • Benjamin B. Lindsey,
  • Dhruv R. Shah,
  • Sharon Hsu,
  • Alexander J. Keeley,
  • David G. Partridge,
  • Shay Leary,
  • Alison Cope,
  • Amy State,
  • Katie Johnson,
  • Nasar Ali,
  • Rasha Raghei,
  • Joe Heffer,
  • Nikki Smith,
  • Peijun Zhang,
  • Marta Gallis,
  • Stavroula F. Louka,
  • Hailey R. Hornsby,
  • Hatoon Alamri,
  • Max Whiteley,
  • Benjamin H. Foulkes,
  • Stella Christou,
  • Paige Wolverson,
  • Manoj Pohare,
  • Samantha E. Hansford,
  • Luke R. Green,
  • Cariad Evans,
  • Mohammad Raza,
  • Dennis Wang,
  • Andrew E. Firth,
  • James R. Edgar,
  • Silvana Gaudieri,
  • Simon Mallal,
  • The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium,
  • Mark O. Collins,
  • Andrew A. Peden,
  • Thushan I. de Silva

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03565-9
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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Matthew Parker et al. use the ARTIC network tiled amplicon PCR and Oxford Nanopore sequencing of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 samples to detect subgenomic RNA changes in the B.1.1.7 lineage endemic in the UK in late 2020/early 2021. They discovered higher subgenomic RNA in B.1.1.7 compared to previous lineages, and find a noncanonical subgenomic RNA that could encode ORF9b.