Coronavirus mutated to become more contagious, research claims

While researchers from around the world are making frantic efforts to seize the novel coronavirus, make vaccines and medicines, a team of researchers claimed that one strain of the virus that emerged in Europe has mutated to become more contagious.

The Los Alamos scientists, led by computational biologist Bette Korber and working in conjunction with researchers at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, examined a global database of strains of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.

According to their analysis, one strain featuring a mutation dubbed Spike D614G quickly out-competed other strains after it appeared in Europe.

The mutation affects the structure of a protein, called the spike protein that is critical to the virus’s ability to infect human cells. The researchers believe this structural change enhances infectivity.

“The mutation Spike D614G is of urgent concern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form,” the authors write. They describe the mutation “increasing in frequency at an alarming rate, indicating a fitness advantage relative to the original Wuhan strain that enables more rapid spread.”

Francis Collins, director the National Institutes of Health, said in a brief email that officials there are aware of the paper, and that it “draws rather sweeping conclusions” about the mutant strain.

The Los Alamos scientists’ goal was to set up an early-warning system for identifying potentially important mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Like all viruses, this pathogen makes mistakes when it copies its genetic material. But, much the way changing a single letter rarely affects the content of a book, most mutations don’t meaningfully affect the behavior of a virus.

The consensus has been that strains of the coronavirus are functionally the same, even if they look genetically different. The fact that the coronavirus is mutating is unsurprising, because all viruses mutate as they replicate. So far, this virus appears relatively stable, according to virologists, but the vast extent of the spread of the coronavirus has given it ample opportunity to evolve.

When the Los Alamos research team examined thousands of genome sequences uploaded to the Global Initiative on Sharing of All Influenza Data database, they identified several mutations that distinguished the version of the virus circulating in Europe from the version that originated in Wuhan; the Spike D614G mutation was among them.

(Source: msn/Taos News)

/ah/teb