It looks like the unique sequences we found in the 2019-nCoV coronavirus were indeed significant!
In this article in last week's Science, the authors found key differences between this virus and SARS, focused most strongly on the N-terminal domain (NTD) and receptor binding domain (RBD) regions of the viruses spike glycoprotein. This is important to understand, because this protein is what the viruses uses to actually infect cells, and also a primary target for antibodies to identify or neutralize the virus.
These regions are also right where we pointed our spotlight in our bioRxiv paper, with the surface glyoprotein region of interest that we identified! In particular, we identified the region from amino acids 9 to 275 as the largest unique sequence, and found it was part of a cluster spanning from amino acids 9 to 883. In the Science paper, the key NTD sequence goes from amino acids 17 - 305, nearly a perfect match to our largest unique sequence, and the RBD sequence goes from amino acids 330 to 521, meaning that together the two cover the majority of our identified cluster!
Now, these folks went a lot deeper than we could (not being protein modelers ourselves), and I'm sure they didn't use our research, given they were likely starting their investigation at the same time we started ours. That said, it's a nice confirmation of our methods and their potential significance to have rapidly and independently identified these regions with our FAST-NA method.
My next question for other researchers, however, is this: what about the other two domains we found?
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