A team of US scientists led by US-based Los Alamos National Laboratory has identified a new, highly-potent strain of coronavirus that has spread globally and is more contagious than the virus in early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos or LANL) is a USDepartment of Energy’s national laboratory initially organized during World WarII for the design of nuclear weapons.
According to the scientists who posted their report The33-page report was posted Thursday on prepreint portal BioRxiv, which is yet tobe peer-reviewed, the new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated tothe US East Coast and has been the dominant strain across the world sincemid-March, according to a report in Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.
“In addition to spreading faster, it may make peoplevulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease,” theauthors warned.
The mutation affects the now infamous spikes on the exteriorof the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells.
The authors said they felt an “urgent need for an earlywarning” so that vaccines manufacturers around the world will be preparedto take on the more deadly mutated strain.
The new strain’s dominance over its predecessorsdemonstrates that it is more infectious, though exactly why is still not known.The report was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirussequences from around the world.
The Los Alamos team, along with by scientists at DukeUniversity and the University of Sheffield in England, identified 14 mutations.
“The story is worrying, as we see a mutated form of thevirus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominantpandemic form,” study leader Bette Korber from Los Alamos, wrote on herFacebook page.
“When viruses with this mutation enter a population,they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are moretransmissible,” added Korber, a computational biologist.
“We have developed an analysis pipeline to facilitatereal-time mutation tracking in SARS-CoV-2, focusing initially on the Spike (S)protein because it mediates infection of human cells and is the target of mostvaccine strategies and antibody-based therapeutics,” the authors wrote.”The mutation ‘Spike D614G’ is of urgentconcern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced tonew regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form,” they added.