Researchers from University College London in the UK looked at 31 mutations of the coronavirus that have spread at least 10 times in cities and countries around the world, and found that no strain has a higher risk of transmitting from person-to-person.
Daily Mail reported that most of the common mutations are neutral, and some are even mildly harmful to the virus. Additionally, the findings also showed that some of the mutations are caused by the response of the immune system rather than the virus adapting to better infect the human hosts.
Coronavirus Mutations
Study lead author and director of the UCL Genetics Institute, Dr. Francois Balloux, said that it is important to gain understanding on the changes of the coronavirus as early as possible as there is already a growing number of mutations that are documented. Scientists are now rapidly trying to figure out if any of these mutations make the virus more infectious or deadly.
In their study, they used a new technique to determine whether the mutations of coronavirus are indeed transmitted at a higher rate, and found that no strain appears to be benefiting the virus.
Coronaviruses, including Sars-CoV-2, has three ways to mutate.
One is through mistake when it is replicating itself, then another way is when the virus attracts another type of virus that has infected the same cell, and lastly through the reaction of the human's immune system.
To date, researchers were able to identify up to 7,000 mutations of the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, that caused COVID-19. Out of that number, nearly 300 have shown evidence that it can occur repeatedly and independently in various cities and countries.
The paper, published in pre-peer review site bioRxiv.org, looked at virus genomes from more than 15,000 COVID-19 patients in 75 countries. The team focused on 31 mutations that spread independently for at least 10 times on their own as the pandemic crisis continues.
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Are Coronavirus New Mutations More Infectious and Deadly?
To better understand their findings, the researchers created a model of the evolutionary tree of the virus and looked at whether a particular mutation was becoming more and more common.
The results showed that most of the mutations are neutral. However, a few of them can either harm or help the virus spread to new human hosts and pass on to 'descendant viruses.' Both neutral and advantageous mutations can become more common as they are passed down to descendant viruses, according to the study.
Furthermore, there are no evidence that any of the common mutations can increase the ability of the virus to spread. In fact, most of these are neutral and can possibly hurt the virus.
First author and senior research fellow at UCL's Genetics Institute, Dr. Lucy van Dorp, said that it is expected that the virus will mutate and diverge into different lineages as it becomes common in the human populations. However, this does not necessarily imply that any of these lineages will be more transmissible or harmful.
