Will the monkeypox virus become more dangerous?

A few years ago, researchers scoured the remains of 1867 people who lived between 30,000 and 150 years ago for traces of variola. They were able to reconstruct the entire variola genomes from the teeth and bones of four northern Europeans. The variola strain that was eradicated in the second half of the 20th century wasn't the direct ancestors of the viruses. They may have a clue to the cause of the disease.

Several genes were lost by the Viking virus over the course of 350 years, according to a 2020 paper. This pattern had been seen before by researchers. Several genes have been lost in the recent past as a result of different changes. Seeing it twice suggests that the loss of the genes was not an accident. It was chosen for that purpose. The losses might have made variola more deadly. He wrote in a commentary accompanying the paper that the disease may have been spread widely.

Scientists are wondering if this could happen again.

The monkeypox virus has been spreading around the globe since May, giving it unprecedented opportunities to change and adapt to the human population. Is it going to become more contagious or more severe?

There is a sobering lesson to be learned from recent history with SARS- CoV-2. The virus first spawned a series of different versions that were able to spread much faster than their progenitors and then evolved to evade human immunity. Some scientists were surprised by its tricks. "If a novel virus is coming into a space in which there isn't immunity, rapid adaptation can happen."

Humans could be presented with unpleasant surprises by monkeypox. Researchers in Berlin published a preprint analyzing the genome of a monkeypox patient. There were many small changes, but they also found a virus in which an entire gene was duplicated and four others were gone. The authors said that the consequence of changes in poxviruses genes whose products are no longer required in a new host is unpredictable. We have known about the monkeypox virus for 64 years, but it may not look like a future human.

Researchers say we shouldn't be too worried. Smith doesn't think the monkeypox virus will turn into a more dangerous version. The massive genomes of Poxviruses are known to evolve at a slow pace, and they don't adapt easily to immunity, as the example of SARS- CoV-2 shows. The respiratory pathogen that caused hundreds of millions of infections in its first year in the human population is known as the "SRS-CoV-2", and it has less opportunity to evolve because it is spread mostly by men who have sex with men.

It could change. There is a chance that the poxviruses will evolve to replicate faster in humans. It would speed up its evolution and allow it to infecting more people.

The monkeypox virus is not very effective at infecting people. In sub-Saharan Africa, it thrives in a range of animal species, most of them rodents. Sometimes the virus has spread into people who have not been previously exposed. In recent years, they have become more frequent, but they have been small. The virus appeared again in the human population.

The current outbreak of monkeypox is different than the last one, as the disease has spread from person to person. Terry Jones is a Computational Biologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin and one of the authors of the July preprint.

Public health officials in Europe are already talking about eliminating the virus in the region because of the decrease in reported cases. In other parts of the world, infections are on the increase. Gay sex is criminalized in a lot of places, which makes it difficult for people to get vaccines or know how to avoid infections.

Monkeypox won't cause a lot of infections, but it will stay there and it will be hard to eradicate. Christian Drosten is a co-author of the July preprint.

As the virus circulates, science can only hint at how it might evolve. Research interest in poxviruses waned after the end of the world's largest eradication campaign. Alcam says that he had to start his talks with an apology for working on poxviruses.

The influenza virus, HIV, and other small viruses are the focus of evolutionary virusesologists. The poxviruses are much larger and more complex than the other ones. The monkeypox genome is more than twenty times the size of HIV. Moss doesn't know what many of those genes do, how they interact with each other, or how changes in any of them might affect humans.

Moss has been trying for years to figure out the difference between the two versions of the monkeypox virus, clade 2 and clade 1, which are causing the global outbreak. He found that clade 1 can kill a mouse 1000 times less than clade 2. With no luck, Moss and his colleagues swapped dozens of clade 2 genes, one at a time, into clade 1 virus, hoping to see it become less deadly. They are going to try to endunge clade 2 with genes from its deadlier cousin.

One thing is clear, though: Poxviruses evolve slowly. Smith says that the genomes are stable and don't change fast. Although poxviruses can trick the immune system, they don't change their surface proteins to get immunity. The vaccines were effective until the end of the campaign to eradicate the disease. There is hope that monkeypox won't turn into a bigger threat.

In order to learn how the monkeypox has evolved, researchers are mining the genomes of patients. It is more expensive to get a high-quality monkeypox sequence than it is to get one for SARS-CoV-2 due to the fact that key regions can be full of deletions and repetition. Richard Neher says that handling the genomes is more complex than theRNA viruses. People sharing their raw data will be more important than the other way around.

The work is yielding some results Two interesting things were noticed when researchers compared the genomes of the current monkeypox outbreak and the one isolated from a traveler from Nigeria in the United Kingdom. After only a few years, the genomes had more point changes than expected, and many of them followed a similar pattern.

The human immune system is fighting the virus. The changes seen in the monkeypox genomes are the signature of a humanprotein called APOBEC3 that acts as a cellular defense mechanism. Andrew Rambaut says that it is not enough to stop the virus replicating.

It's possible that one of them could benefit the virus in the long run. Rambaut thinks that this is probably not going to be very important from an evolutionary point of view.

Researchers want to know how long ago monkeypox started to circulate in humans. According to ine O'Toole, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh, the virus is adding about six changes a year. According to a family tree of virus genomes from the current outbreak, the viruses that were circulating in Nigeria in late 2017, carrying nine APOBEC3-type mutations, jumped into humans about a year and a half before the outbreak was noticed in Nigeria. The analysis shows that the virus has been in humans for a long time.

poxviruses can evolve in a lot of different ways. They do a lot of evolutionary off-roading, as evidenced by the fact that they turned to monkeypox after studying vaccinia for many years. According to Elde, poxviruses have a central region with about 100 genes that are mostly involved in creating new copies of the virus, and terminal regions with another 100 or so genes that interact with the host.

The terminal genes seem to be a key part of evolution. The terminal regions of generalist poxviruses have more genes than the ones that specialize in infecting people. The poxviruses that jumped to humans are believed to have evolved from a rodents' poxviruses. The Viking virus may have become more deadly due to the loss of genes.

Poinar says that smallpox goes from being a very avirulent form to a very nasty form until we eradicate it. According to the 2020 Science paper and his own work on a variola genome from a 17th century child mummy, Poinar believes this happened between the fourth and the 15th century.

It's not clear how the loss of genes would affect variola's virulence. Eugene Koonin is a researcher at the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Koonin says it's a big deal to make the replication 10% faster. The variant outgrew the competitors very quickly once it happened.

The terminal genes can change. It can help the virus in two ways when they are duplicated. It is possible for at least one copy of the gene to undergo a beneficial change because of the additional copies. The other copies can be redundant and lose their genetic information. The mechanism in the vaccinia virus is called a "genomic accordion" by Elde.

The human immune system could be weakened by those changes. Elde says, "We have some patterns and some predictions we can make, but we really can't stand solidly behind them because there's a weather system that has massive variables."

Since the preprint was published, Drosten's lab has been studying the virus that was isolated from a patient in Berlin. According to Drosten, the results show a clear difference in cell culture. He cautions that the lab findings don't necessarily translate into an advantage in the real world. The difference in cell culture shown by this virus is remarkable.

If the virus had a real-world advantage but it didn't transmit onward, then humanity might have been lucky. The current outbreak of monkeypox is a race between humans and the virus, according to him. Who is going to win the game? I would use my money to fight the virus.

Researchers can watch a poxviruses evolve in real time if the epidemic continues. Elde says that they hope that this also is an opportunity to move science forward. I want to learn how these viruses work so that we can have some control over this.