Explainer | Deltacron: could it happen for real and would it be a threat?
- A report of a coronavirus strain combining elements of the Delta and Omicron variants was questioned soon after it emerged
- Such recombination is possible but highly unlikely, virologists say
But doubts later emerged about the “Deltacron” hybrid – with some attributing it to data error during genome sequencing – and the sequences were withdrawn from an open-source genome information database.
But should we worry about the prospect of such hybrid strains in the future?
How did “Deltacron” happen and why was it ruled out?
Leondios Kostrikis, a professor of biological sciences at the university, told Bloomberg last weekend that his team had found 25 patients who were infected with a strain of the coronavirus with Omicron-like genetic signatures within the Delta genomes. The genome sequencing data was uploaded to open source database Gisaid.org.
But other scientists concluded the findings could be the results of a lab error, with virologist Tom Peacock from Imperial College London tweeting that it looked “to be quite clearly contamination” rather than a real recombination.
The specific region of the sequences with Omicron-like mutations tend to “drop out” during the sequencing process and the gap could be accidentally replaced with fragments of Omicron which were amplified and result in hybrid genomes, Peacock said.
He added that it was not really related to the “quality of the lab” or anything similar and such errors happened at every sequencing lab from time to time.