According to a new study published in the journal, the genetic variation of the new coronavirus that dominates the world today infects human cells more easily than the original one that emerged in China. Cell Thursday.
Laboratory-based research suggests that this current mutation is more communicable between people in the real world compared to the previous iteration, but this has not yet been proven.
“I think the data shows that there is a single mutation that actually makes the virus better able to replicate and perhaps have high viral loads,” said Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious disease specialist in the United States, who was not involved in the investigation, he commented to Journal of the American Medical Association.
“We don’t have a connection to whether an individual worsens with this or not. It just seems like the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible, but this is still in the stage of trying to confirm that,” he added. .
Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Duke University in North Carolina partnered with the University of Sheffield research group COVID-19 Genomics UK to analyze genome samples published in GISAID, an international resource to share genomic sequences.
They found that the current variant, called “D614G”, makes a small but powerful change in the “spike” protein that protrudes from the virus’s surface, which it uses to invade and infect human cells.
Scientists first published their article on the bioRxiv medical prepress site in April, where it received 200,000 visits, a record.
But it was initially criticized because scientists had not shown that the mutation itself was responsible for its dominance; could have benefited from other factors or chance.
Therefore, the team conducted additional experiments, many at the behest of the editors of Cell.
They analyzed data from 999 British patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and found that those with the variant had more viral particles, but without changing the severity of their disease.
Meanwhile, laboratory experiments showed that the variant is three to six times more capable of infecting human cells.
“It seems likely that it is a fitter virus,” said Erica Ollmann Saphire, who conducted one of the experiments at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology.
‘This variant is the pandemic’
But everything at this stage can only be said to be “probable”: in vitro experiments often do not replicate the dynamics of a pandemic.
As far as we know, although the variant currently circulating is more “infectious”, it may or may not be more “communicable” between people.
In any case, said Nathan Grubaugh, a virologist at the Yale School of Public Health who was not part of the research: the spread of the variant “either by natural selection or by chance means that this variant is now the pandemic” .
Writing in a comment, Grubaugh added that, for the general public, these results don’t change much.
“While significant studies are still needed to determine if this will influence drug or vaccine development significantly, we do not expect D614G to alter our control measures or worsen individual infections,” he said.
“It’s more of a live look at the development of science: An interesting discovery was made that potentially affects millions of people, but we don’t yet know the full scope or impact.”
© Agence France-Presse
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