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Review
. 2022 Jul;51(7):1494-1501.
doi: 10.18502/ijph.v51i7.10083.

SARS-COV-2 Notable Mutations and Variants: A Review Article

Dariush D Farhud  1   2   3 , Nooshin Mojahed  3   4
Affiliations
Review

SARS-COV-2 Notable Mutations and Variants: A Review Article

Dariush D Farhud et al. Iran J Public Health. 2022 Jul.

Abstract

SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) the virus that caused an epidemic of sever acute respiratory syndrome is what the world has been dealing with since Dec 2019. As the pandemic continues different variants that emerge during mutations have become the latest concern, with notable examples detected in South Africa, Brazil, and UK. Variants are complicated and each one is a collection of several mutations, all of which have the potential to change the virus in unexpected ways. Studying variants is imperative as they can lead the epidemic to the increase of population immunity. In the present study, we reviewed key mutations and concerning variants according to the WHO tracking Sars-Cov-2 program. Databases were searched through Feb to Mar 2022. Overall, 477 studies were extracted from databases, among them 165 studies included mutations, 239 included COVID-19 variants and 43 included both mutations and variants. At the final step of data screening 24 studies associated to mutations, 31 studies with the highlighted information on COVID-19 variants and 31 studies related to both mutations and variants were extracted for this review article. In conclusion, analyses of the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 indicate that structural proteins are key molecules in the assembly of virus while NSPs can have different biochemical properties and possibly cellular functions.

Keywords: COVID 19; Concerning variants; Mutations; SARS-COV-2.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests.

Figures

Fig. 1:
Fig. 1:
Information flow through the phase of review article. All the studies were published during 2019–2022
Fig. 2:
Fig. 2:
Molecular structure of Spike protein, S1 and S2 region. S1 is for attachment and S2 is for fusion SP: Signal peptide of S1/RBD: Receptor binding domain/RBM: Receptor binding motif (which is within RBD) / FP: Fusion peptides/HR: Hepta repeats
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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