A staff of US researchers has detected not less than 4 “cryptic” variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in samples of wastewater from New York City’s public sewer system.Marc Johnson, Professor of molecular microbiology and immunology on the University of Missouri and a co-corresponding creator on the examine, believes the outcomes recommend the “cryptic” mutations they recognized in New York City may very well be linked to potential animal origins.While these origins haven’t been verified but, he believes one potential supply may very well be the rats that frequent New York City’s sewer system.The findings are revealed in Nature Communications journal.”For occasion, we nonetheless do not know the place the Omicron variant got here from, however it needed to come from someplace,” Johnson mentioned.”These variants are effervescent up all over the place, together with Omicron, which finally spilled into the final inhabitants and wreaked havoc. We suppose these bizarre lineages may very well be the place the subsequent variant of Covid-19 comes from.”The researchers have been sampling wastewater from 14 therapy vegetation in New York City since June 2020.They additionally reached out to different researchers in the US who have been doing comparable work with wastewater. They noticed some uncommon outcomes.”They have been totally different, however all of them had comparable mutations in widespread at one specific location on the virus — Q498. What’s superb is that in many of the samples from New York City, the Q in Q498 had changed into a Y, or glutamine into tyrosine. If you have a look at the database, there was not, and continues to not be, a human affected person who has had that mutation,” Johnson mentioned.The researchers famous a potential rationalization may very well be a organic course of referred to as convergent evolution.”An animal in Missouri isn’t going to combine with the identical sort of animal in New York City,” mentioned John Dennehy, a virologist and professor of biology at Queens College, City University of New York.”Therefore, the evolution of the virus in every geographic space is unbiased of one another, however as a result of it is the identical animal, the virus appears the identical in each locations,” he added.According to Davida Smyth, the lead creator, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, “wastewater surveillance is quick, cheap and unbiased.”It additionally “has the power to be applied relying on useful resource availability in a wide range of contexts, particularly in areas with restricted assets resembling low testing and vaccine availability,” Smyth mentioned.
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Scientists find “cryptic” variants in wastewater, Health News, ET HealthWorld
