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“Mutation in the Spike protein“The identified variant, explains Caruso to Adnkronos, has several mutation points in the protein Spike, the hook that the virus uses to attack the receptor present in the target cells of our body. Like the English, the Italian variant also has a mutation in one nerve center of the Spike / cell receptor interaction, more precisely at position 501 “. But unlike the Gb mutant”, the Italian variant also has a second mutation in position 493, which makes its Spike protein slightly different from that of the pandemic virus we know of. “
The discovery of the “Italian variant” “We came to describe the Italian variant by chance,” Caruso continues, “observing an abnormal viral persistence in a patient who had suffered from Covid-19 in April. Even after recovery, swabs done from August had always given positive results. with highly loaded viruses. In November we decided to sequence the virus to understand the reason for this persistence, and to our surprise we realized that we had identified a new variant, similar but not identical to the English variant that was also beginning to circulate in Italy. At this point we also sequenced a sample from the same patient obtained in August ”, discovering that“ the Spike variata was already present then, with all its mutations ”.
The times The president of the Italian Society of Virology then specifies: “We do not know if the English variant emerged exactly at the end of September, as ours did at the beginning of August. A temporal analysis of the Sars-CoV-2 sequences, carried out by the Massimo Ciccozzi’s group, “an epidemiologist at the Campus BioMedico University of Rome”, tells us that this new Italian variant could have been generated at the beginning of July. What we can say about the studies of my colleague Ciccozzi is that ours is undoubtedly the first evidence of mutations in the Spike protein at the level of position 501 in Italy and perhaps, at least to date, in Europe “.
The relationship between the variants “The sequence homology between the variant that we have identified and the English one leads us to think that the former may have generated the others that are emerging today on our continent. But to affirm this it is necessary to reconstruct the steps, and a lot of analysis is needed. of the viral genome not yet available “.
Does the vaccine work in the Italian variant? According to Caruso, “theoretically there is no fear that the anti-Covid vaccine will not work in the Italian variant. The vaccine generates a complex response to many areas of the Spike protein, so even if there were some antibodies that could not recognize an area mutated like that of position 501 or 493, surely there would be others capable of binding to unaltered portions of the protein. In a short time we will have some answer to this question “.
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