The monkeypox outbreak is most closely related to strains detected in the UK, Singapore and Israel in the last two years, according to the draft sequence.
Michael Le Page is a person.
An electron microscope image of a monkeypox virus.
CDC/Cynthia S. Goldsmith.
A team in Portugal has released the first draft of the monkeypox genome. The monkeypox viruses detected in the UK, Singapore and Israel are most closely related to the mild West African type, according to the DNA sequence.
The current outbreak is the largest of its kind outside of Central and West Africa, and it isn't yet clear if there are any changes that make it more transmissible in humans. This could take some time since monkeypox has a large and complex genome.
There were 127 confirmed and suspected cases of monkeypox in 10 countries, including the US, UK and Australia, at the time of writing, and researchers suspect the true number is even higher.
The sample was taken from a male patient on 4 May. The first team to make a sequence public is the one led by Gomes.
The draft sequence from Portugal has too many gaps to draw conclusions, but he has seen a more complete sequence from a team in Belgium.
There were three cases in the UK in the year 2018, two of which were related to someone returning from Nigeria.
As more samples are analyzed, it should be clear if a single variant of monkeypox is responsible for all the cases.
It will be difficult to establish whether there is something unique about this variant. It's hard to link specific changes to changes in viral transmissibility with the now well studied SARS-CoV-2 virus. The monkeypox virus is much larger than the coronaviruses, with around 200,000 DNA letters long compared with 30,000.
The team member said that the analysis was ongoing.
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