Table 3.

Conservation of siRNA target sites in circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains. Full-length, high-quality SARS-CoV-2 sequencing results were retrieved from the GISAID EpiCoV™ Database (www.gisaid.org) and analyzed for the presence of the siRNA target sites. To estimate conservation within all currently circulating strains (‘Any variant’), the 100,000 latest submissions until October 26^th 2021 were included without restricting to a specific variant. Lineages defined by WHO as Variants of Concern (VoC) or Variants of Interest (VoI) were separately downloaded and analyzed accordingly. For VoC, only the latest 20,000 submissions, and for VoI, all available sequences were considered. VoC and VoI are labeled according to WHO nomenclature, for details regarding the included lineages according to the Pango nomenclature system see materials & methods. n, number of analyzed full-length SARS-CoV-2 sequences

		Variants of concern				Variants of interest
Variant	Any variant	Alpha	Beta	Gamma	Delta	Lambda	Mu
Sequences (n)	100 000	20 000	20 000	20 000	20 000	848	5889
siRNA	Conservation of target site (Only perfect matches in %)
L1	94.92	95.10	91.15	96.65	93.43	98.23	92.96
L2	39.53	37.34	36.16	29.81	47.39	22.40	28.76
L3	24.11	23.32	26.06	17.43	15.95	16.98	13.04
O1	99.55	99.33	99.83	99.42	99.51	99.76	99.59
O2	99.65	99.46	99.45	99.66	99.33	99.88	99.54
O3	99.90	99.95	99.88	99.93	99.91	100	99.83
N1	99.54	99.60	99.71	99.71	99.55	99.64	99.88
N2	99.68	99.79	99.90	99.89	99.50	99.52	99.06
N3	99.50	99.69	99.77	98.70	99.67	99.29	99.52
U1	96.49	96.89	97.20	91.16	93.78	92.57	90.25
U2	86.64	84.74	86.05	59.20	82.78	89.62	81.28
U3	24.53	38.39	33.49	25.95	35.98	38.44	28.83