Identification and Characterization of Species-Specific Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Physicochemical Properties

There is an urgent
need to elucidate the underlying mechanisms
of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) so that vaccines and treatments
can be devised. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has
genetic similarity with bats and pangolin viruses, but a comprehensive
understanding of the functions of its proteins at the amino acid sequence
level is lacking. A total of 4320 sequences of human and nonhuman
coronaviruses was retrieved from the Global Initiative on Sharing
All Influenza Data and the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
This work proposes an optimization method COVID-Pred with an efficient
feature selection algorithm to classify the species-specific coronaviruses
based on physicochemical properties (PCPs) of their sequences. COVID-Pred
identified a set of 11 PCPs using a support vector machine and achieved
10-fold cross-validation and test accuracies of 99.53% and 97.80%,
respectively. These findings could provide key insights into understanding
the driving forces during the course of infection and assist in developing
effective therapies.