Abstract: We scanned more than 182,000 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) genomes for selective sweep signatures and found a distinct footprint of positive selection located around a non-synonymous change (A1114G; T372A) within the spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD), predicted to remove glycosylation and increase binding to human ACE2 (hACE2), the cellular receptor.

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Result: A total of six such sites were identified (Table S1); notably, only a single site (A1114G, genomic position 22,676; Figure 1B) was centrally located in one of the sweep regions; this is within the codon position 372 of the S protein.

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