research worker in China have gathered grounds that thesuper infective Omicron variantmay have originate through a chance encounter with mouse . Their work has some caution , but it leave an interesting alternative to theprevailing theorythat the variance evolved in a chronically disgusted person with a weak immune scheme .
Their study was publish in theJournal of Genetics and Genomicson Christmas Eve , but a free - to - read draft of the paper can be found on the pre - pint serverbioRxiv .
The SARS - CoV-2 Omicron edition was first cover in South Africa on November 24 , 2021 . The variant is clearly strange as it contains 45 mutations , some of which appear to make it more immune to vaccinum and more infectious compared to other variants . Most interrogatively , many of these mutations have not been see before in other var. . In the evolutionary tree of SARS - CoV-2 variants , Omicron sticks out like a huffy thumb .
To excuse this oddness , a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing argues that this raiment of chromosomal mutation differs from the computer virus that evolved in human patient , but intimately resembled the variation affiliate with computer virus evolution in mouse cell . moreover , they say that the mutation show that the virus has adapted to infecting mouse cells .
This , they believe , suggests that the virus may have hop-skip over to black eye from human beings where it accumulated these unusual variation before jumpstart back into humans .
“ Our results suggest that the primogenitor of Omicron jumped from human being to mouse , rapidly accumulated mutations contributing to infecting that host , then jumped back into humans , indicating an inter - species evolutionary trajectory for the Omicron irruption , ” the discipline authors write in their paper .
However , there are some drawbacks to this theory . Firstly , SARS - CoV-2isn’t great at infecting mice . The part of mouse mobile phone which the virus would typically use to gain entry has little chemical attraction for the received SARS - CoV-2 spike protein . Other researchershave manage to adaptSARS - CoV-2 to taint mice in the lab – raising the question of whether science laboratory animals are postulate in its descent – but it ’s not been document in the genuine worldly concern .
This seduce it hard , albeit not impossible , to understand how the computer virus made this leap from humans into mouse . Many scientists havebeen skepticalof the animal - source story of Omicron , although generally , they believe it ’s too early to to the full understand the blood line of the variance . Nevertheless , it ’s an important motion as it could assist us predict and prevent the rise of dangerous variants in the future .
