Fighting Mutations with Mutations: Evolutionarily Adapting a DNA Aptamer for High‐Affinity Recognition of Mutated Spike Proteins of SARS‐CoV‐2

An on-going challenge with COVID-19, which has huge implications for future pandemics, is the rapid emergence of viral variants that makes diagnostic tools less accurate, calling for rapid identification of recognition elements for detecting new variants caused by mutations. We hypothesize that we can fight mutations of the viruses with mutations of existing recognition elements. We demonstrate this concept via rapidly evolving an existing DNA …