Real-time monitoring epidemic trends and key mutations in SARS-CoV-2 evolution by an automated tool

With the global epidemic of SARS-CoV-2, it is important to monitor the variation, haplotype subgroup epidemic trends and key mutations of SARS-CoV-2 over time effectively, which is of great significance to the development of new vaccines, the update of therapeutic drugs, and the improvement of detection reagents. The AutoVEM tool developed in the present study could complete all mutations detections, haplotypes classification, haplotype subgroup epidemic trends and key mutations analysis for 131,576 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences in 18 hours on a 1 core CPU and 2G internal storage computer. Through haplotype subgroup epidemic trends analysis of 131,576 genome sequences, the great significance of the previous 4 specific sites (C241T, C3037T, C14408T and A23403G) was further revealed, and 6 new mutation sites of highly linked (T445C, C6286T, C22227T, G25563T, C26801G and G29645T) were discovered for the first time that might be related to the infectivity, pathogenicity or host adaptability of SARS-CoV-2. In brief, we proposed an integrative method and developed an efficient automated tool to monitor haplotype subgroup epidemic trends and screen out the key mutations in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 over time for the first time, and all data could be updated quickly to track the prevalence of previous key mutations and new key mutations because of high efficiency of the tool. In addition, the idea of combinatorial analysis in the present study can also provide a reference for the mutation monitoring of other viruses.