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Mary McKenna
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This is one of the puzzling mysteries of the Covid pandemic: where did Omicron come from, almost a year ago?The fast-moving, highly contagious variant arrived just after Thanksgiving 2021, replete with mutations. When scientists unraveled the network, they discovered that Omicron was not similar to Delta or Alpha, the two waves that preceded it. Instead, their divergence from their closest non-unusual ancestor dates back more than a year, to the first months of the pandemic, almost a geological era in the time of viral replication. .
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How can something be so contagious that it has traversed more than 120 countries in two months and yet eluded detection for so long?This time?
The conflicting hypotheses were pushed to be taken into account: he had taken refuge in an organization of other people who had little contact with the outside world and no participation in sequencing programs. He had found a home in a user so immunocompromised that he might simply not beat the infection, ceding the territory of the virus in which to reflect and change. Or, a third thought: it fell back into the animal world, not into the bats in which it first discovered a host, but into a new species that would cause a mutation in a new way.
This possibility, officially known as opposite zoonoses and unofficially as flashback, is already a known risk. In April 2020, just a few months after the virus began to spread internationally, it migrated to mink farms in the Netherlands, causing the death or preemptive slaughter of millions of animals, and a few months later, it returned to humans.
No one has been able to say exactly which of those 3 hypotheses should explain Omicron’s arrival, and with Omicron generating variants so quickly, the discussion has gone off the researchers’ priorities. Now, a new study from the University of Minnesota studies team is giving new energy to this debate. Their studies suggest that Omicron adapted to mice, where it developed its mutational network before moving on to humans.
“These Omicron mutations are evolutionary lines left through transmission of the virus from one animal species to another,” lead writer Fang Li, a professor of pharmacology and director of the university’s Coronavirus Research Center (Li declined an interview), said in a statement.
Simon Hill
Chris Stokel-Walker
Eric Ravenscraft
Julien Chokkattu
In the study, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers took a structural biology technique (reading the shapes of molecules in the virus) to read about mutations in the Omicron spike protein, which allows it to invade cells. They discovered certain mutations that made the virus more effective by binding to a specific receptor, ACE2, as it exists in mouse cells, to editing that receptor provided in humans. They showed these works by assembling non-infectious pseudoviruses expressing the Ominon tip. and looked at their binding to cells designed to come with mouse or human receptors. They found that Omicron had more affinity for mouse editing.
This is the first article recommending that mice played a role in the appearance of Omicron. Last December, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed that the effects of a laser spectroscopy investigation of its mutations are incompatible with the rate of evolution of Omicron in humans. consistent with a faster mutation rate in rodents. They were also aware of some Omicron mutations that had already been detected in previous SARS-CoV-2 strains when mice were experimentally inflamed for Covid lab research.
Of course, neither this study nor the news closes the book on Omicron’s roots. University of Saskatchewan Organization. ” I don’t think we have enough data to say it came from there, but we can say that this speculation is still on the table. “
And it underscores the fact that SARS-CoV-2 will recover among wildlife and domestic animals and the human world. Since those mink infections more than two years ago, many other species have become more vulnerable. An open-access control panel created through researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the Wildlife Conservation Society in the United States recorded 735 identifications or infections in 31 species, which is almost an undercount because the underlying software only retrieves knowledge from official sources. Among those identifications: a cat in Thailand, as well as hamsters in Hong Kong, which not only caught a variety of SARS-CoV-2, but also transmitted it to their owners.
“We want to pay more attention to candidate reservoirs in nature that may just be containers to combine this virus and then provide a threat of spill transmission to humans,” says Sarah Hamer, a veterinary ecologist and professor of epidemiology in Texas. University A
Simon Hill
Chris Stokel-Walker
Eric Ravenscraft
Julien Chokkattu
Determining whether wild animals that acquire the virus can also transmit it is a challenge of studies; They may just be unfortunate patients but hopeless hosts. Last year, researchers from several Canadian universities and federal agencies showed that North American deer mice, which live in forests and suburbs, can experimentally inflame with SARS-CoV-2, spread the virus and spread other deer mice. But whether that would translate into an ongoing infectious threat, in mice or humans, can’t be guessed from this data, says lead author Darwyn Kobasa, who is a studies scientist who leads studies on high-containment respiratory viruses at Public Health Agency Canada. In the real world, animal-human encounters are harder to track.
“Mice are potential prey for cats, so there may also be an oblique link, from mice to cats and humans,” he says. “
Not everyone knows what role other species play in harboring the virus, let alone whether they can do so long enough for it to mutate and pose a new risk to humans. And some scientists replace their attitude as they collect more data. In 2021, researchers in Missouri and New York who extracted viral genetic curtains from wastewater devised they had known a rodent signature in what they called “cryptic mutations” that have rarely been known in humans. A year later, they reinterpreted those paintings and are now more inclined to the option that immunocompromised people, who have suffered prolonged infections, would possibly play an accidental role in viral evolution.
“Many of the mutations that appear in those persistently inflamed patients are also the same ones that gave the impression on Omicron, and are similar to those that gave the impression in cryptic samples,” says John Dennehy, a virologist and professor of biology at Queens College of the City University of New York. And a lot of other people looked for the SARS coronavirus in mice and rats, and we never saw anything resembling those cryptic variants, or Omicron for that matter. “
Scientists who need to examine the animals harboring the virus have little function for building systems of studies. Currently, more physically powerful animal disease surveillance systems track species that anchor industries or ecosystems, such as poultry, that are vulnerable to avian influenza. , or moose, moose and deer, which are prone to chronic debilitating disease. Extensive monitoring of potential threats to species is the dream of pandemic prevention. But it has yet to get the investment, or predictive successes, that researchers want.
Hamer believes existing programs, through which researchers are already looking for other diseases, can help outline the risk of return. They just want a little help. ” There is no shortage of wildlife biologists and box veterinarians who have the ability to catch, test and release creatures. And there’s no shortage of lab expertise to temporarily determine what has neutralizing antibodies, what has active viral shedding,” he says. In addition to the blood samples he already wanted. “And then we have money in the freezer minus 80,” he says. We are waiting for the resources to prepare them for SARS-CoV-2. “
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