With the detection of the ‘deltacron’ variant, which has characteristics of both the Delta and Omicron variants, experts pointed out that hybrid variants such as this need to be watched closely as they can pick up the best parts of both and quickly develop into a supervirus.
Scott Nguyen, bioinformatician at the Public Health Laboratory in Washington, told NPR that the variant seems to be optimizing the combinations – picking the best traits from each for infectiousness and immune evasion. “These recombinant variants provide some interesting clues to how this virus is going to evolve next,” he said.
The deltacron variant was first detected in samples taken from 25 patients with Covid-19 in Cyprus. Nguyen noticed that each virus in the sample actually carried a combination of genes from the two variants – what scientists call a “recombinant”.
“Recombination occurs when two viruses infect the same person or the same animal and what you then have is…effectively two viruses can exchange large amounts of genetic information and you effectively get a new virus out the other end … that is how we generate pandemics of influenza,” WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan explained. Ryan said that the more the virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to change.
While experts point out that recombinant viruses should not be a reason to panic, they also stressed that it is important to keep a close watch on them to understand the progression of the coronavirus.
“You know, early on in the pandemic, we were all expecting SARS-CoV-2 to not mutate too much,” Nguyen said. “But this virus has surprised us at every corner. So I think these recombinant variants provide some interesting clues to how this virus is going to evolve next” – and just how quickly the next variant of concern may appear.
“This is not a novel concern,” Simon-Loriere, a virologist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, said. “The surface of the viruses is super-similar to Omicron, so the body will recognize it as well as it recognizes Omicron,” Simon-Loriere said.
The fact that deltacron has probably spread across borders emphasises the need for ongoing genomic surveillance to keep tabs on how the virus is changing and moving. As the coronavirus is continuing to spread widely and infect large numbers of people, it’s likely that more variants will emerge including through recombination, a Biochemistry expert in Dublin wrote in The Conversation.
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