During the 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak in South Korea, we sequenced full viral genomes of strains isolated from 4 patients early and late during infection. Patients represented at least 4 generations of transmission. We found no evidence of changes in the evolutionary rate and no reason to suspect adaptive changes in viral proteins.
Keywords: MERS-CoV; Middle East respiratory syndrome; South Korea; coronavirus; genome sequencing; microevolution; outbreak; phylogenetic analysis; respiratory infections; viruses.