Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology (Oct 2020)

Within-Host Diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 Patients With Variable Disease Severities

  • Hebah A. Al Khatib,
  • Fatiha M. Benslimane,
  • Israa E. Elbashir,
  • Peter V. Coyle,
  • Muna A. Al Maslamani,
  • Abdullatif Al-Khal,
  • Asmaa A. Al Thani,
  • Hadi M. Yassine

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.575613
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

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Background: The ongoing pandemic of SARS-COV-2 has already infected more than eight million people worldwide. The majority of COVID-19 patients either are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. Yet, about 15% of the cases experience severe complications and require intensive care. Factors determining disease severity are not yet fully characterized.Aim: Here, we investigated the within-host virus diversity in COVID-19 patients with different clinical manifestations.Methods: We compared SARS-COV-2 genetic diversity in 19 mild and 27 severe cases. Viral RNA was extracted from nasopharyngeal samples and sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform. This was followed by deep-sequencing analyses of SARS-CoV-2 genomes at both consensus and sub-consensus sequence levels.Results: Consensus sequences of all viruses were very similar, showing more than 99.8% sequence identity regardless of the disease severity. However, the sub-consensus analysis revealed significant differences in within-host diversity between mild and severe cases. Patients with severe symptoms exhibited a significantly (p-value 0.001) higher number of variants in coding and non-coding regions compared to mild cases. Analysis also revealed higher prevalence of some variants among severe cases. Most importantly, severe cases exhibited significantly higher within-host diversity (mean = 13) compared to mild cases (mean = 6). Further, higher within-host diversity was observed in patients above the age of 60 compared to the younger age group.Conclusion: These observations provided evidence that within-host diversity might play a role in the development of severe disease outcomes in COVID-19 patients; however, further investigations are required to elucidate this association.

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