SARS-CoV-2 infection of domestic animals and their role in evolution and emergence of variants of concern.

Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that is responsible for COVID-19 pandemic, is a zoonotic RNA virus that has been reported in animals, including domestic animals. Due to the growing concern of health threat that could arise from active transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between pet owners and their pets, there is need to monitoring the emergence of a highly pathogenic strain of SARS-CoV-2 that is capable of transboundary infection, or a serious outbreak among human populations.

Methods: We carried out a search in English, on PubMed and NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) SARS-CoV-2 resources for relevant journals and nucleotide sequence data, that were published between 2019 and 2023. The CoVsurver mutations application on GISAID webpage was used to analyse mutation, nucleotide sequence alignment was carried out using MAFFT (Multiple Alignment using Fast Fourier Transform) version 7 and maximum likelihood tree was constructed by bootstrapping with 1000 replicates on MEGA 11 software.

Results: A total of 47 mutations at the Spike gene region were identified, and mutation D614 was the most observed mutation. Nucleotide sequences of isolates from domestic animals had high sequence identity with Wuhan-Hu-1 reference sequence and the representative sequences of previously circulating VOCs from humans.

Conclusion: This reveals that there is spill over of previously circulating variants of concern (VOC) to household pets from their infected owners. Hence, there is an urgent need for more intense surveillance to be carried out globally to monitor evolution of SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses as a result of human - pet association.