Abstract
Seasonal coronaviruses (OC43, 229E, NL63, and HKU1) are endemic to the human population, regularly infecting and reinfecting humans while typically causing asymptomatic to mild respiratory infections. It is not known to what extent reinfection by these viruses is due to waning immune memory or antigenic drift of the viruses. Here we address the influence of antigenic drift on immune evasion of seasonal coronaviruses. We provide evidence that at least two of these viruses, OC43 and 229E, are undergoing adaptive evolution in regions of the viral spike protein that are exposed to human humoral immunity. This suggests that reinfection may be due, in part, to positively selected genetic changes in these viruses that enable them to escape recognition by the immune system. It is possible that, as with seasonal influenza, these adaptive changes in antigenic regions of the virus would necessitate continual reformulation of a vaccine made against them.
Highlights
Coronaviruses were first identified in the 1960s and, in the decades that followed, human coronaviruses (HCoVs) received a considerable amount of attention in the field of infectious disease research
We focus on the seasonal HCoVs that have been continually circulating in humans: OC43, 229E, HKU1, and NL63
We focus on S1 rather than the receptor-binding domain (RBD) within S1 in our analyses, because it is known that neutralizing antibodies bind to epitopes within the N-terminal domain (NTD) as well as the RBD of S1 (Liu et al, 2020a; Zhang et al, 2018; Zhou et al, 2019)
Summary
Coronaviruses were first identified in the 1960s and, in the decades that followed, human coronaviruses (HCoVs) received a considerable amount of attention in the field of infectious disease research. At this time, two species of HCoV, OC43 and 229E, were identified as the causative agents of roughly 15% of common colds (McIntosh, 1974; Heikkinen and Jarvinen, 2003). At the writing of this paper, amidst the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, no vaccine for any HCoV is currently available, though many candidate SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are in production and clinical trials (Krammer, 2020)
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