The fact that the next corona variant may surprise us again and whether we are able to know what its next mutation will be is discussed in an article by Atlantic, citing data and expert estimates,
A new mutation in the virus could be even more serious or more contagious as the virus tries to find new ways to escape the antibodies we have built.
According to the publication, in order to understand how the coronavirus evolves, we must take into account a number of factors such as the fact that its genome is 30,000 letters long.
The above implies a huge number of possible combinations of mutations.
According to Jess Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, that number far exceeds the number of people in the known universe.
Scientists are trying to decipher the significance of these possibilities through the “fitness landscape” model.
The higher the levels of the coronavirus, the more mutations it develops and the more versions it discovers. As a result, the chances of it reaching new record levels increase.
“We do not really know what the ‘peaks’ of the virus might be. We did not know there was an ‘peak’ of Omicron,” said Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at Columbia University in Britain. “We can not guess what else is likely to happen.”
What we do know is that the vast majority of mutations will either make the virus less potent (creating “plains”) or have no effect (“slopes”). However, a very small percentage of these mutations will be “translated” into pandemic outbreaks, ie “peaks”. We do not know how high they will be, nor how often they will appear.
When the Delta mutation prevailed on the planet, it seemed to displace all other versions of the coronavirus. “I definitely thought the next variant would come from Delta,” said Katia Coel, a biologist at Emory University. But then “Omicron” appeared on a “distant peak”, in a direction that no one had thought to look.
“With Omicron, I think we were lucky,” said Sergei Pont, an evolutionary biologist at Temple University. The set of mutations that make the variant so strong that it infects even vaccinated people just happens to make it a little less inherently infectious. This does not mean that it will always exist. Coronavirus infectivity is a by-product of two other factors under more direct evolutionary pressure.
On the one hand, how inherently contagious it is and how easily it can bypass the immunity achieved in the past.
It does not matter how deadly it is, because the coronavirus is usually transmitted long before its host dies.
Atlantic
Performance: skai.gr/ Daily
See all the news
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
Skai
