Inferring the hosts of coronavirus using dual statistical models based on nucleotide composition

Citations Over TimeTop 25% of 2015 papers

Abstract

Many coronaviruses are capable of interspecies transmission. Some of them have caused worldwide panic as emerging human pathogens in recent years, e.g., severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). In order to assess their threat to humans, we explored to infer the potential hosts of coronaviruses using a dual-model approach based on nineteen parameters computed from spike genes of coronaviruses. Both the support vector machine (SVM) model and the Mahalanobis distance (MD) discriminant model achieved high accuracies in leave-one-out cross-validation of training data consisting of 730 representative coronaviruses (99.86% and 98.08% respectively). Predictions on 47 additional coronaviruses precisely conformed to conclusions or speculations by other researchers. Our approach is implemented as a web server that can be accessed at http://bioinfo.ihb.ac.cn/seq2hosts.

Related Papers

• → Discovery of a Novel Coronavirus, China Rattus Coronavirus HKU24, from Norway Rats Supports the Murine Origin of Betacoronavirus 1 and Has Implications for the Ancestor of Betacoronavirus Lineage A(2015)201 cited
• → Studies on viral pneumonia related to novel coronavirus SARS‐CoV‐2, SARS‐CoV, and MERS‐CoV: a literature review(2020)55 cited
• → Betacoronavirus Assembly: Clues and Perspectives for Elucidating SARS-CoV-2 Particle Formation and Egress(2021)52 cited
• → A Novel Potentially Recombinant Rodent Coronavirus with a Polybasic Cleavage Site in the Spike Protein(2021)29 cited