INFORMATION AND COMPLEXITY-BASED ANALYSIS OF THE VARIATIONS OF THE CORONAVIRUS GENOME BETWEEN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease that has had a deadly effect on all countries around the world. Since an essential step in developing a vaccine is to consider genomic variations of a virus, in this research, we analyzed the variations of the coronavirus genome between different countries. For this purpose, we benefit from complexity and information theories. We analyzed the variations of the fractal dimension and Shannon entropy of genome walks for two-hundred samples of coronavirus genomes from 10 countries, including the Czech Republic, France, Thailand, USA, Japan, Taiwan, China, Australia, Greece, and India. The result of the analysis showed the significant variations (P-value[Formula: see text]=[Formula: see text]0.0001) in the complexity and information content of genome walks between different countries, and therefore, we conclude that the structure of the coronavirus genome is significantly different among different countries. This is a novel and very significant investigation that should be considered for developing a vaccine for this deadly virus.