Results and Discussion . To characterize the biological properties of the P.1 variant, we compared hCoV-19/Japan/TY7-501/2021 (TY7-501) (which was isolated from a traveler who arrived in Japan from Brazil) with SARS-CoV-2/UT-NCGM02/Human/2020/Tokyo (NCGM02) ( 13 ), an early SARS-CoV-2 strain from February 2020, and with SARS-CoV-2/UT-HP095-1N/Human/2020/Tokyo (HP095), which is genetically similar to contemporaneous SARS-CoV-2 strains that predominate globally. NCGM02 encodes aspartic acid (...