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A variant of coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 “very similar to the infamous English variant“. A “Italian variant” discovered in Brescia, “which precedes the variant that emerged only in late September in the UK and then spread to Europe, including Italy, and could also be a precursor.” Announces it atAdnkronos Health Arnaldo Caruso, President of the Italian Society of Virology (Siv-Isv), Professor of Microbiology and Clinical Microbiology at the University of Brescia, Director of the Microbiology Laboratory of Asst Spedali Civili.
Coronavirus, “Italian variant similar to English” discovered
The identified variant, explains Arnaldo Caruso, “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. mutation in a 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 at position 493, which makes its Spike protein slightly different from the pandemic virus we all know today.”
But how did the Italian variant come to be described? “By chance – says Caruso – when observing an anomalous viral persistence in a patient who had suffered from Covid-19 in April. Even after recovery, swabs done from August had always been positive with highly loaded viruses. 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 varied Spike was already present then, with all its mutations ”.
“We do not know if the English variant emerged exactly at the end of September, as ours did at the beginning of August – specifies the number one virologists – A temporal analysis of the Sars-CoV-2 sequences, carried out by Massimo Ciccozzi’s group “, epidemiologist at the BioMedico Campus of the University of Rome,” tells us that this new Italian variant could have been generated at the beginning of July. What we can say from the studies of my colleague Ciccozzi is that ours is undoubtedly the first evidence of mutations in the Pico protein at the level of position 501 in Italy and perhaps, at least to date, in Europe. The sequence homology between the variant we have identified and the English one leads us to think that the former may actually have generated the others that are emerging today in our continent. But to affirm this it is necessary to reconstruct the passages, and there are still not many analyzes of the viral genome available “.
The Italian variant of the coronavirus and the vaccine
But is there a fear that the Covid vaccine will not work in the Italian variant? “Theoretically no – Caruso responds – The vaccine generates a complex response to many areas of the Spike protein”, so “even if there were some antibodies that could not recognize a mutated area like the one at position 501 or 493, there would surely be others capable of binding to non-mutated portions of the protein. Their binding would be sufficient to prevent interaction between Spike and the cell receptor, if only because of a kind of “steric hindrance” that the antibodies would create on the surface of the virus. in any case we will have some answer to this question. “
“The high viral load present in the August and November swabs” performed on the patient who did not test negative “allowed us to isolate the viral mutants in Brescia. This, Caruso says, will allow us to test these viruses with sera from Covid patients. -19 obtained during the first pandemic wave, and to evaluate the ability of antibodies to neutralize this variant with respect to previously circulating viral strains. As soon as they become available, sera from vaccinated patients will also be evaluated in a similar way. I remain optimistic at this time ” , concludes the president of the Italian virologists.
