Continuing the topics about COVID-19 in the past two days, please let me talk about some co-evolution stuff. By the way, I stole today’s title from the program of SMBE 2020.
Host and pathogen always co-evolve to enable survival and flourish. There is a general idea: If the pathogen is “smart” enough, they will not kill all the hosts otherwise pathogen will lose their “habitats” and die out, too. Following this line of thinking, a “super smart” virus should increase its transmissibility and decrease its virulence so that it can have enough hosts to enable its reproduction. Sadly, COVID-19 is such a “super smart” virus.
Suppose I can get the COVID-19 samples from human tissues in different places, I would like to sequence the mixed DNA and separate them to human and COVID-19 sequences. Run genetic divergence analyses within human and virus to find out the candidate genes then pair the candidate genes if they were sampled together. The outstanding gene pairs may be associated with the specificity of virus strains and their hosts.