A series of catastrophic waves have marked the timelines of the COVID-19 pandemic, often spearheaded by newly evolved variant of the pathogen, such as Delta and Omicron.
This is how evolution can play out. The novel coronaviruses is so formidable because of its ceaseless novelty and because it is so rapid in spreading.
The variant of concern with the coronaviruses has undergone many more changes than we would expect under the normal evolutionary pace.
Normally, viruses tend to change at a relatively constant pace, taking a year or more for a new variant to emerge. The coronaviruses does not seem to stick to that calendar.
The Delta variant came from its ancestral form in six weeks.
The researchers sought to find out where this dramatically accelerated timeframe comes from.
The emergence of variant of concern (VOCs, the most harmful and harmful lineages) might be linked to changes in the substitution rate of the virus: the rate at which new mutations arise in the pathogen's genetic data was analyzed to examine how the emergence of variant of concern (VOC
According to the researchers, the background substitution rate of the virus suggests that it has two new genes every month.
VoCs are a different beast, with variant such as Alpha, Alpha, and Delta acquiring numerous mutations in relatively short timeframes, each of which can alter things like the variant's infectiousness, ability to replicate, level of fitness, and so on.
The researchers explain in their paper that the number of mutations observed in these four VOCs is much higher than what would be expected.
According to the team, the secret of the VOCs' accelerated mutation is not a constant, ongoing phenomenon, but rather something that appears to happen temporarily in the virus's evolution.
The team writes that they find compelling evidence that increases in the substitution rate underpin the emergence of VOCs.
The increased rate of substitution is four times higher than the background estimate, but the analysis suggests that the accrual of mutations happens in a compressed burst, perhaps as short as four weeks for the Delta variant.
The Alpha variant took 14 weeks, while the other variant took 17 weeks.
We are not entirely sure why these bursts occur at all.
Natural selection, infections in unvaccinated populations, and persistent infections in particular individuals are some of the factors that could explain the emergence of VOCs.
The fact that we can see and track the changes in the virus means that ongoing monitoring is important.
It might be possible to stop the next wave instead of catching it.
This makes the case for goodgenomicssurveillance because we didn't catch the intermediate forms of Omicron, and surely there were a few.
Imagine if you could have detected Omicron in the first few patients and stopped it from spreading.
The findings are reported in two books.
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