CoVe-Tracker: An Interactive SARS-CoV‑2 Pan Proteome Evolution Tracker

SARS-CoV-2 has significantly mutated its genome during
the past
3 years, leading to the periodic emergence of several variants. Some
of the variants possess enhanced fitness advantage, transmissibility,
and pathogenicity and can also reduce vaccine efficacy. Thus, it is
important to track the viral evolution to prevent and protect the
mankind from SARS-CoV-2 infection. To this end, an interactive web-GUI
platform, namely, CoVe-tracker (SARS-CoV-2 evolution tracker), is developed
to track its pan proteome evolutionary dynamics (https://project.iith.ac.in/cove-tracker/). CoVe-tracker provides an opportunity for the user to fetch the
country-wise and protein-wise amino acid mutations (currently, 44139)
of SARS-CoV-2 and their month-wise distribution. It also provides
position-wise evolution observed in the SARS-CoV-2 proteome. Importantly,
CoVe-tracker provides month- and country-wise distributions of 2065
phylogenetic assignment of named global outbreak (PANGO) lineages
and their 177564 variants. It further provides periodic updates on
SARS-CoV-2 variant(s) evolution. CoVe-tracker provides the results
in a user-friendly interactive fashion by projecting the results onto
the world map (for country-wise distribution) and protein 3D structure
(for protein-wise mutation). The application of CoVe-tracker in tracking
the closest cousin(s) of a variant is demonstrated by considering
BA.4 and BA.5 PANGO lineages as test cases. Thus, CoVe-tracker would
be useful in the quick surveillance of newly emerging mutations/variants/lineages
to facilitate the understanding of viral evolution, transmission,
and disease epidemiology.