EVOLUTIONARY RELATIONSHIPS OF OMICRON SUBLINEAGES

Abstract

We collected 21 spike protein S sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants and one reference S sequence (QIC53213) of the Goc variant from the GenBank database, USA. We identified three Omicron sublineages BA.1 (B.1.1.529.1), BA.2 (B.1.1.529.2) and BA.3 (B.1.1.529.3) by multiple S sequence alignment. All three sublineages BA.1, BA.2 and BA.3 are distantly related to the Goc lineage with the distances of 0.02410, 0.02225 and 0.02559, respectively. Two sublineages BA.1 and BA.3 have the closest evolutionary relationship with a distance of 0.00438. In particular, the BA.2 sublineage has a distant evolutionary relationship with the sublineages BA.1 and BA.3 with the respective distances of 0.01285 and 0.01078