Public Health & Health Science Division, ULAB

This is a literature review on the effects of spike mutations in the B1.1.7 SARS-CoV-2 variant and its effect on vaccine efficacy. This paper has organized the pertinent literature on the researched effects of vaccine efficacy and explores a number of mutations in the spike protein. The search was conducted on PubMed and the criteria for inclusion was based on relevance to specifically mutations in the B1.1.7 variant, being a primary source, conducted after January of 2021, and its reproducibility and pertinence to the research topic. There are 16 fully extracted studies discussed in the results, with a brief overview of the conducted experiment in relation to the papers’ conclusions. The strengths of this paper are distilling the molecular methods of these individual papers and being able to compare and contrast diverse experiments on the same mutations. However, due to the diversity of experiments discussed in this paper, the landscape of SARS-CoV-2 mutations and vaccine efficacy are difficult to distill. The discussed papers were evaluated on the possible threats of the mutations and the comparable effect of known mutations. This is an important step for evaluating transmissibility and virulence. This literature review further shows the need to have a standard set of experiments that can be used to evaluate the effect of mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants and its effect on vaccine efficacy in order to make