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Scientists are concerned to discover how the new UK and California covid variants have combined to form a heavily mutated hybrid. The worry is, the mutation could send us spinning into a new, more scary phase of the pandemic.
The two variants have combined their genomes to make a new hybrid version, which was discovered in a Californian virus sample. A blend of the highly transmissible UK B.1.1.7 variant and the Californian B.1.429 variant, experts suspect it lies at the heart of the recent dramatic wave of cases in Los Angeles.
Bette Korber from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico found the combined variant and has also seen “pretty clear” evidence of it in her database of American viral genomes. If the news is confirmed it means this is the pandemic’s first ‘recombinant’ to be detected.
Recombination is different from mutation
Unlike the usual mutations, which drive one change at a time, recombination can result in multiple mutations happening at the same time. Many experts think recombination is how the covid 19 virus came into being in the first place, and it could easily lead to ‘even more dangerous’ variants. Right now nobody knows how dangerous this first ‘recombination event’ might be. It might even prove a one-off.
Why does recombination happen? Because the enzyme that replicates a virus’s genome tends to fall off the strand of RNA it wants to copy, then rejoins where it left off. When the host cell includes two different coronavirus genomes the enzyme jumps from one to the other several times, each time combining different elements of the them.
Worryingly, the variants we’re seeing might have created the raw materials required for recombination to happen, simply because people can be infected by more than one variant at the same time. While there’s no evidence of widespread recombination yet, all coronaviruses recombine eventually. So, in scientific circles, it’s no surprise.
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