Covid, the new Italian variant (similar to the English one) circulating since August- Corriere.it

A new variant of Sars-Cov2 very similar to the English B.1.1.7 has been circulating in Italy since the beginning of August. The Italian variant was discovered in Brescia and predates the one that emerged in late September in the UK: it could be a precursor. To announce it 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, who explained to AdnKronos: The virus has various mutation points in the spike protein, 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 a nerve center of the Spike / cell receptor interaction, more precisely in position 501. The same position also affected theSouth African variant. But unlike the British mutant, the Italian variant also has a second mutation in position 493, which makes its Spike protein slightly different from the pandemic virus we all know today.

The discovery

The discovery was completely coincidental when observing an abnormal viral persistence in a patient who had suffered Covid-19 in April. Even after recovery, swabs done from August had always given positive results with highly loaded viruses, ”Caruso explains. 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 variegated Spike was already present then, with all its mutations.

12 thousand mutations mapped

It is normal for a virus, when it is replicated millions of times, in some cases to commit what we can define, with a comparison, typographical errors. Viruses that use RNA as genetic material, such as SARS-CoV-2, are vulnerable to mutations, but most of the time they are not important (there are already more than 12,000 mutations mapped). Among these, the one that distinguishes the Wuhan virus from the one that spread in Europe last winter: the D614G mutation, which has become dominant throughout the world, with a transmission capacity up to ten times greater than the original Chinese lineage.

The functionality of the vaccine is not compromised.

Who knows how many of these variants there are, it would be enough to look for them, but we need to work on genomic sequences that should be financially supported explains Pierangelo Clerici, President of the Italian Association of Clinical Microbiologists and of the Italian Federation of Scientific Laboratory Societies. Each of these variants has small mutations, but we don’t have to worry about the functionality of the vaccine. To give a simple example as if we had thirty wagons and we changed two of them: the vaccine directed at the thirty wagons, will not carry 30, but 28. The vaccine stimulates the production of antibodies against all the antigenic part that is not constituted. only from that part that these two mutations induced. We have no evidence that there are mutations that could compromise the efficacy of the vaccine. because they do not completely change the structure of the viral RNA. If it changed 80% of the RNA, it would be a problem because we would have a mutated virus, completely different from the original, which has never been seen in a respiratory virus. Caruso himself excludes that the anti-Covid vaccine cannot work: the vaccine generates a complex response towards many areas of the Spike protein so that even if there were some antibodies that could not recognize a mutated area such as that of position 501 or 493 , there would certainly be others capable of binding to non-mutated portions of the protein. Their binding would be enough to prevent the interaction between Spike and the cell receptor, if only for a kind of “steric hindrance” that the antibodies would create on the surface of the virus. However, before long we will have some answer to this question.