Humanity is currently facing the challenge of two devastating pandemics caused by two very different RNA viruses: HIV-1, which has been with us for decades, and SARS-CoV-2, which has swept the world in the course of a single year. The same evolutionary strategies that drive HIV-1 evolution are at play in SARS-CoV-2. Single nucleotide mutations, multi-base insertions and deletions, recombination, and variation in surface glycans all generate the variability that, guided by natural selection, enables both HIV-1’s extraordinary diversity and SARS-CoV-2’s slower pace of mutation accumulation. Even though SARS-CoV-2 diversity is more limited, recently emergent SARS-CoV-2 variants carry Spike mutations that have important phenotypic consequences in terms of both antibody resistance and enhanced infectivity. We review and compare how these mutational patterns manifest in these two distinct viruses to provide the variability that fuels their evolution by natural selection.

人类目前面临着由两种截然不同的 RNA 病毒引起的两种毁灭性流行病的挑战：HIV-1 已经伴随我们数十年，SARS-CoV-2 在一年之内席卷了世界。驱动 HIV-1 进化的相同进化策略在 SARS-CoV-2 中也发挥着作用。单核苷酸突变、多碱基插入和缺失、重组以及表面聚糖的变异都会产生变异，在自然选择的指导下，使得 HIV-1 具有非凡的多样性，而 SARS-CoV-2 的突变积累速度较慢。尽管 SARS-CoV-2 的多样性较为有限，但最近出现的 SARS-CoV-2 变体携带刺突突变，这些突变在抗体抵抗性和增强感染性方面具有重要的表型后果。我们回顾并比较了这些突变模式在这两种不同病毒中的表现，以提供通过自然选择促进它们进化的变异性。