ESC: a comprehensive resource for SARS-CoV-2 immune escape variants

Abstract

Ever since the breakout of COVID-19 disease, ceaseless genomic research to inspect the epidemiology and evolution of the pathogen has been undertaken globally. Large scale viral genome sequencing and analysis have uncovered the functional impact of numerous genetic variants in disease pathogenesis and transmission. Emerging evidence of mutations in spike protein domains escaping antibody neutralization is reported. We have built a database with precise collation of manually curated variants in SARS-CoV-2 from literature with potential escape mechanisms from a range of neutralizing antibodies. This comprehensive repository encompasses a total of 5258 variants accounting for 2068 unique variants tested against 230 antibodies, patient convalescent plasma and vaccine breakthrough events. This resource enables the user to gain access to an extensive annotation of SARS-CoV-2 escape variants which would contribute to exploring and understanding the underlying mechanisms of immune response against the pathogen. The resource is available at http://clingen.igib.res.in/esc/.

The 2022Nucleic Acids Researchdatabase issue and the online molecular biology database collection

“…The T-cell COVID-19 Atlas ( 9 ) predicts the affinity of interaction between virus-derived peptides and HLA alleles, potentially helping to predict the susceptibility of people with different HLA genotypes to disease. Finally, ESC ( 10 ) is a compilation of SARS-CoV-2 variants with documented effects on antibody binding while VarEPS ( 11 ) considers a number of metrics, including antibody binding, in order to predict the potential impact of all possible SARS-CoV-2 variants.…”

AVM: a manually curated database of aerosol-transmitted virus mutations, human diseases, and drugs

“…To maintain the quality of the AVM database in the collection process, each entry was meticulously gathered through a series of steps, which were employed for the construction of the VIMIC [48], ESC [49], and MSDD [50] databases.…”

A proposed workflow for proactive virus surveillance and prediction of variants for vaccine design

“…As the pandemic progresses and novel variants arise, their genomes will be collected into databases [ 28 ] and fed into these computational models as additional training data to improve their accuracy and aid design of booster vaccines if necessary. In the later stages of the pandemic when many strains have been collected, the accumulation of sequences will also permit additional computational techniques for predicting the long-term evolution of a virus.…”