Extended Data Fig. 5: Comparisons of GC content across taxa.
From: Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic
Conducting analogous analyses of codon usage bias as Ji et al. (2020) with additional (and higher quality) snake coding sequence data and several miscellaneous eukaryotes with low genomic GC content failed to find any meaningful clustering of the SARS-CoV-2 with snake genomes (a). Instead, similarity in codon usage metrics between the SARS-CoV-2 and eukaryotes analyzed was correlated with coding sequence GC content of the eukaryote, with more similar codon usage being identified in eukaryotes with low GC content similar to that of the coronavirus (b).
