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. 2021 Aug 19;184(19):4848–4856. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.08.017

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© 2021 The Author(s)

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

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Evolution of the furin cleavage site in the spike protein of betacoronaviruses

(A) Sequence alignment of the region around the furin cleavage site (FCS) in SARS-CoV-2 (NCBI: MN908947) and bat coronavirus RaTG13 (NCBI: MN996532) showing that the former was the result of an out-of-frame nucleotide sequence insertion.

(B) Amino acid sequence alignment of the FCS region in representative members of the different subgenera of betacoronaviruses, highlighting the evolutionary volatility of this site and that the relevant amino acid motif (RRAR) in SARS-CoV-2 is functionally suboptimal. The residues predicted to be O-linked glycans are also marked.

See also Document S1.