The Red Queen’s Crown: an evolutionary arms race between coronaviruses and mammalian species reflected in positive selection of the ACE2 receptor among many species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The world is going through a global viral pandemic with devastating effects on human life and socioeconomic activities. This pandemic is the result of a zoonotic coronavirus, Severe Acute Respirsatory Syndrom Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) which is believed to have originated in bats and transferred to humans possibly through an intermediate host species (Zhou et al. 2020; Coronaviridae Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses 2020). The virus attacks host cells by attaching to a cell membrane surface protein receptor called ACE2 (Ge et al. 2013; Zhou et al. 2020). Given the critical role of ACE2 as a binding receptor for a number of coronaviruses, we studied the molecular evolution of ACE2 in a diverse range of mammalian species. Using ACE2 as the target protein, we wanted to specifically test the Red Queen hypothesis (Dawkins and Krebs 1979) where the parasite and host engage in an evolutionary arms race which can result in positive selection of their traits associated to their fitness and survival. Our results clearly show a phylogenetically broad evolutionary response, in the form of positive selection detected at the codon-level in ACE2. We see positive selection occurring at deep branches as well as 13 incidents at the species level. We found the strongest level of positive selection in Tasmanian devil ( Sarcophilus harrisii ), donkey ( Equus asinus ), large flying fox ( Pteropus vampyrus ), Weddell seal ( Leptonychotes weddellii ), and dog ( Canis lupus familiaris ). At the codon-level, we found up to 10% of ACE2 codons are impacted by positive selection in the mammalian lineages studied. This phylogenetically broad evolutionary arms race can contribute to the emergence of new strains of coronaviruses in different mammalian lineages with a potential to transfer between species given the common binding receptor ACE2. Our study provides a molecular evolutionary perspective to the current pandemic and sheds light on its evolutionary mechanisms. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Theodosius Dobzhansky)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".