How did the omicron variant originate? Scientists seek to solve mystery

The sheer number of omicron mutations raises many questions: whether the variant will elude vaccines, whether it will spread more easily, and whether it will lead to a severe disease state. The variant’s changes also make scientists wonder about its origins.

When the scientist who first detected the new variant at the end of November took samples from foreign diplomats who had traveled together to Botswana and sequenced them, the international database surprised: the samples looked more like a variant first detected. early April 2020 and known as the United Arab Emirates lineage.

After Sikhulile Moyo, director of the Harvard HIV Reference Laboratory in Botswana and a researcher at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, took a closer look, saw that the older variant had fewer mutations, and discarded what he saw as it. same.

What it did show was that omicron has an unusually high number of mutations in the gene that helps the coronavirus spread. Since the discovery of omicron, others have reviewed samples in freezers in their labs and discovered that the lineage was already circulating in October.

Viruses do not accumulate mutations in one step. Thus, scientists continue to try to understand how so many mutations for omicron arose in an apparently short space of time.

One of the theories is that the variant developed in an immunosuppressed person who harbored the virus for much longer than normal, allowing it to go through many adaptations.

In southern Africa, the high rate of HIV infections means that millions of people have weakened immune systems. While most take antiretroviral drugs that prevent the HIV virus from multiplying, many do not. That means its ability to fight and eliminate pathogens from the body is severely diminished. Those with advanced cancer have similar immune system problems.

Another hypothesis being explored is whether the variant could have been transferred from people to an animal host, where it adapted to that host relatively quickly and then returned to humans.

It could also be that there simply hasn’t been enough global evidence from various COVID samples and that omicron’s close relatives have already developed undetected.

Trying to find out the origins of omicron is important as it gives an idea of ​​how it is behaving and what SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, could do next.

Still, figuring out the origin of a virus is often tricky, and there is still no answer to the contentious issue of how the virus that caused the pandemic first appeared in people.