Multiple alignment of the surface glycoprotein and identification of sequence variants
Surface glycoproteins sequences obtained from the GenBank were aligned using the multiple sequence alignment feature of the BLAST sequence analysis tool from NCBI (Supplementary Figure 1) (Altschul et al., 1997). The first sequence SARS-CoV-2 from isolate Wuhan-Hu-1 (Accession: MN908947.3; Wuhan, China) was used as the consensus sequence to determine subsequent variant sequences from the different isolates (Wu et al., 2020).
Furthermore, the surface glycoprotein sequences obtained from GISAID were analyzed for similarity by using the multiple sequence alignment tool Clustal Omega (Supplementary Figure 2) (Madeira et al., 2019). Again, the sequences were compared to the Wuhan-Hu-1 isolate (Accession: MN908947.3) to determine divergent sequences. Also, multiple sequence alignment for all isolates from Belgium was conducted separately (Supplementary Figure 4). The multiple sequence alignments were analyzed using the software BioEdit to identify the sequence differences between isolates.