I saw the recently posted genomes of COVID-19, SARS and MERS on NCBI

and decided to run a multiple sequence alignment to find their relationships. The resulting phylogenetic tree I got looked like this:

This analysis shows that COVID 19 is closest to SARS. in its sequence. The interesting thing is how the changes in the sequence compare and how different are various viral proteins as a result. Especially interesting is the Spike glycoprotein that is on the surface and helps the virus enter the cell:

Running multiple analyses, I saw how the sequence differences can be impacting different structural changes which really clarified a lot of things I was reading in literature.

These changes are important and play a role in zoonotic transmission as well as rate of infection.

There is a lot one can read about but until you see how it is done, the meaning of the available data or how various labs propose to develop an antiviral drug or a vaccine for this novel corona virus can be difficult to understand. If anyone would like to learn about these epidemic viral outbreaks, learn to find and analyze public ally available data and possibly even contribute to these efforts, I invite you to check out this upcoming online program on infectious diseases:

Bioinformatics for Infectious Diseases (https://edu.tbioinfo.com/bioinformatics-for-infectious-diseases-2020)