Possible Impacts of Extreme Solar/Cosmic Activity on the Mutation and Evolution of Coronavirus Spike Proteins

One of the hypotheses on the origins of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is that the extreme solar/cosmic activity caused the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which, however, is controversy. Surely, the association of two phenomena is not very convincing because great attention in these studies is paid to the solar/cosmic activity, a bit of attention to the pandemics, but almost no attention to how pathogens changed. In this study, we analyzed the mutation and evolution of coronavirus (CoV) spike proteins from 1941 to November 2019, just before the full outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and deliberately included the first identified severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein to associate with the solar/cosmic activity, including (1) the emergence of human CoV strains, (2) the unique CoV spike proteins over time, (3) the unique CoV spike proteins having a phylogenetic relationship with the past, (4) the trajectory of CoV spike proteins along the time course, (5) the periodicity of CoV spike proteins, and (6) the differences in the amino acid composition of CoV spike proteins between the extremes and non-extremes of solar activity. The results provide 11 pieces of new evidence showing that the associations exist to different degrees, suggesting that the extreme solar/cosmic activity affects the mutation and evolution of CoV spike proteins, and could serve as a risk factor to induce the emergence of COVID-19.