Dear Editor,
The apolipoprotein B editing complex (APOBEC) protein family members are host antiviral enzymes known for catalyzing cytosine to uracil (C>U) deamination in foreign single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) and RNA (ssRNA) (Blanc and Davidson, 2010; Salter and Smith, 2018). Enzymatic target motifs for most of the APOBEC enzymes have been experimentally identified, among which the most common ones are 5′-[T/U]C-3′ and 5′-CC-3′ for DNA/RNA substrates (Salter and Smith, 2018; McDaniel et al., 2020). It was recently suggested that SARS-CoV-2 undergoes genome editing by host-dependent RNA-editing proteins such as APOBEC (Di Giorgio et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2020; Simmonds, 2020; Schmidt et al., 2021).
