SARS-CoV-2 intra-host recombination promotes epistatic spike interactions and temperature-dependent adaptation
Altaf et al. report that SARS-CoV-2 viral recombination occurs during a chronic COVID-19 infection within individual hosts. This process can bring together mutations, especially in the N-terminal region, enabling both immune escape from neutralizing antibodies and adaptation to a range of host environments confronted by temperature gradients.
