Kathy Li

TL;DR: Investigation of the hypothesis for positive selection of Spike D614G in the United Kingdom using more than 25,000 whole genome SARS-CoV-2 sequences indicates that 614G increases in frequency relative to 614D in a manner consistent with a selective advantage.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors demonstrate that the immunodominant SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) receptor binding motif (RBM) is a highly variable region of S and provide epidemiological, clinical, and molecular characterization of a prevalent, sentinel RBM mutation, N439K.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared the severity of the delta variant compared with the alpha variant by determining the relative risk of hospital attendance outcomes and found that outbreaks of the Delta variant in unvaccinated populations might lead to a greater burden on health-care services than the alpha variants.

TL;DR: Investigation of the hypothesis for positive selection of Spike 614G at the level of an individual country, the United Kingdom, using more than 25,000 whole genome SARS-CoV-2 sequences collected by COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium finds that Spike 6 14G clusters are introduced in the UK later on average than 614D clusters and grow to larger size after adjusting for time of introduction.

TL;DR: The SARS-CoV-2 reverse genetics toolkit as discussed by the authors can be used to rescue infectious virus through transient transfection (without in vitro transcription or additional expression plasmids).