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London, March 14
The ancestor of the new coronavirus has undergone “very little change” to adapt to humans from bats, according to a new study which suggests that the ability of the virus to spread from person to person has likely evolved in the flying mammal before jumping to its new human host.
The study, published in the journal PLOS biology, evaluated hundreds of thousands of sequenced genomes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and found that during the first 11 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there had been very little “ significant genetic change ” observed in the coronavirus.
However, he noted that certain changes such as the D614G mutation and similar changes in the spike protein of the virus affected its biology.
“This does not mean that no change has occurred, that mutations of no evolutionary importance accumulate and ‘surf’ along millions of transmission events, as is the case in all viruses,” explained the study’s first author, Oscar MacLean, of the Center for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
But scientists said it was “surprising” to see how transmissible SARS-CoV-2 was from the start.
“Usually viruses that jump to a new host species take some time to acquire adaptations to be as capable as SARS-CoV-2 of spreading, and most never get past this stage, resulting in no fallout. outcome or localized outbreaks, ”said Sergei Pond, another study co-author from Temple University in the United States.
By analyzing the mutations undergone by the novel coronavirus and related sarbecoviruses – the group of viruses to which the COVID virus from bats and pangolins belongs – scientists found evidence of fairly large changes, but all before the emergence of SARS -CoV-2 in humans.
Based on this observation, the researchers said that SARS-CoV-2 comes with a ready-made ability to infect humans and other mammals, with these properties likely evolving in bats before jumping to humans.
“Although an undiscovered ‘facilitator’ intermediate species cannot be ruled out, collectively our results support that the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 is capable of efficient human-to-human transmission due to its adaptive evolutionary history in bats, not humans, a relatively generalist virus, ”the scientists wrote in the study.
Although the novel coronavirus is still cleared by the human immune response in the vast majority of infections, scientists have warned that it is now moving faster away from the January 2020 variant used in all current vaccines to increase immunity protective.
Current vaccines will continue to work against most of the variants in circulation, but as time passes and the gap between the number of people vaccinated and unvaccinated grows large, they have said the virus is believed to be more than possibilities of evading vaccines.
“The first race was to develop a vaccine. The race is now to get the world’s population vaccinated as quickly as possible, ”said David L. Robertson, lead author of the study at the University of Glasgow. PTI
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