R&I – TxPAT **
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — Researchers have discovered seven new coronavirus variants in the United States with similar mutations.
The study was posted online Sunday as a preprint and has yet to be peer-reviewed.
It started with Jeremy Kamil, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport.
Kamil had been sequencing samples from COVID-19 tests and uploaded a bunch of data to the international data sharing initiative, GISAID.
Soon he was hearing from other scientists about the same mutation. According to Kamil, the variants all appear to have originated in the U.S.
“When we see the same mutation appearing over and over, what that tells us is that there might be a reason why the virus keeps kind of selecting for this particular mutation,” said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and one of the lead co-authors on the study.
As first reported by The New York Times, researchers found multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein variants affecting amino acid position 677.
As noted in the study, the spike protein plays critical roles in host cell entry.
RandyMarsh