Onkar Kulkarni, Suneetha Narreddy, Lamuk Zaveri, Irawathy Goud Kalal, Karthik Bharadwaj Tallapaka, Divya Tej Sowpati
Clinical Infectious Diseases, ciab136, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab136
Published: 16 February 2021
TO THE EDITOR—Several cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) reinfection have now been documented across the globe. Recently, Selhorst et al reported a case of reinfection despite the presence of neutralizing antibodies. Their study showed the presence of S477N, an immune escape mutation, in the spike protein (S) of the virus from the second episode. This conforms to the fact that most reported reinfections show the presence of at least 1 unique variation in structural proteins between episodes, particularly the spike protein. Here, we report 2 cases—1 clear case and 1 possible case—of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection that were detected during routine surveillance. Of note, there was no difference in the spike protein of the virus between episodes.
To establish the genetic diversity of the virus, the samples were sequenced on Oxford Nanopore MinION (Oxford Nanopore Technologies, UK) following the ARTIC v3 protocol, and further validated using Illumina sequencing (Illumina Inc., USA). Genomes were assembled from raw data following a previously published method, covering most of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (Supplementary Table 1). The details of the cases and subsequent analysis are outlined below.