R/I ~ AA (old news-March 23, 2022)
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Nguyen found a recombinant variant that’s mostly delta but contains the spike protein of omicron. “So a good chunk of the virus’ spike protein is omicron but the body of the virus is still delta,” Nguyen says.
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“Omicron happened around Christmas and New Year, when there were many social gatherings,” Luo explains. “So you can imagine, you go to one social gathering and got exposed to delta, and then you go to a different social gathering, and you catch omicron.”
If both variants manage to infect the same cell, at the same time, then the virus can end up doing recombination, Luo says. In essence, during replication, one variant steals a chunk of genes from another variant. So the delta variant, in way, plagiarized part of omicron’s genetic code.
“If you’re writing a document, you can have typos where you change a single letter,” Luo says. “But you can also copy and paste and move big chunks of text. That’s recombination, where one variant, in this case delta, takes a big chunk of text from omicron.”
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