New York: The virus that causes Covid-19 is accumulating genetic mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious, says a study involving more than 5,000 patients in the US.
That mutation, called D614G, is located in the spike protein that pries open our cells for viral entry, according to the paper published in the peer-reviewed journal mBIO.
The patients involved in this study of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences were from Houston, Texas.
The paper shows “the virus is mutating due to a combination of neutral drift-which just means random genetic changes that don’t help or hurt the virus-and pressure from our immune systems,” said Ilya Finkelstein, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study.
During the initial wave of the pandemic, 71 per cent of the novel coronaviruses identified in patients in Houston had this mutation.
When the second…