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The variant contains a mutation thought to help the virus dodge the immune system, scientists said.
Feb. 24, 2021. Updated 10:03 p.m. ET
By Apoorva Mandavilli
A new form of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly in New York City, and it carries a worrisome mutation that may weaken the effectiveness of vaccines, two teams of researchers have found.
The new variant, called B.1.526, first appeared in samples collected in the city in November. By the middle of this month, it accounted for about one in four viral sequences appearing in a database shared by scientists.
One study of the new variant, led by a group at Caltech, was posted online on Tuesday. The other, by researchers at Columbia University, is not yet public.
... The Caltech researchers discovered the rise in B.1.526 by scanning for mutations in hundreds of thousands of viral genetic sequences in a database called GISAID. “There was a pattern that was recurring, and a group of isolates concentrated in the New York region that I hadn’t seen,” said Anthony West, a computational biologist at Caltech.
He and his colleagues found two versions of the coronavirus increasing in frequency: one with the E484K mutation seen in South Africa and Brazil, which is thought to help the virus partially dodge the vaccines; and another with a mutation called S477N, which may affect how tightly the virus binds to human cells. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/h...riant-nyc.html
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bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.14.431043;
this version posted February 23, 2021.
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
SARS-CoV-2 lineage B.1.526 emerging in the New York region detected by software utility created to query the spike mutational landscape
Posted February 23, 2021.
Anthony P West Jr., Christopher O Barnes, Zhi Yang, Pamela J Bjorkman
DIO: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.14.431043
Abstract
Wide-scale SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing is critical to monitoring and understanding viral evolution during the ongoing pandemic. Variants first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil have spread to multiple countries. We have developed a software tool, Variant Database (VDB), for quickly examining the changing landscape of spike mutations. Using this tool, we detected an emerging lineage of viral isolates in the New York region that shares mutations with previously reported variants. The most common sets of spike mutations in this lineage (now designated as B.1.526) are L5F, T95I, D253G, E484K or S477N, D614G, and A701V. This lineage appeared in late November 2020, and isolates from this lineage account for ~25% of coronavirus genomes sequenced and deposited from New York during February 2021.
PDF Format:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...043v2.full.pdf
Feb. 24, 2021. Updated 10:03 p.m. ET
By Apoorva Mandavilli
A new form of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly in New York City, and it carries a worrisome mutation that may weaken the effectiveness of vaccines, two teams of researchers have found.
The new variant, called B.1.526, first appeared in samples collected in the city in November. By the middle of this month, it accounted for about one in four viral sequences appearing in a database shared by scientists.
One study of the new variant, led by a group at Caltech, was posted online on Tuesday. The other, by researchers at Columbia University, is not yet public.
... The Caltech researchers discovered the rise in B.1.526 by scanning for mutations in hundreds of thousands of viral genetic sequences in a database called GISAID. “There was a pattern that was recurring, and a group of isolates concentrated in the New York region that I hadn’t seen,” said Anthony West, a computational biologist at Caltech.
He and his colleagues found two versions of the coronavirus increasing in frequency: one with the E484K mutation seen in South Africa and Brazil, which is thought to help the virus partially dodge the vaccines; and another with a mutation called S477N, which may affect how tightly the virus binds to human cells. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/h...riant-nyc.html
__________________________________________________
bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.14.431043;
this version posted February 23, 2021.
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
SARS-CoV-2 lineage B.1.526 emerging in the New York region detected by software utility created to query the spike mutational landscape
Posted February 23, 2021.
Anthony P West Jr., Christopher O Barnes, Zhi Yang, Pamela J Bjorkman
DIO: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.14.431043
Abstract
Wide-scale SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing is critical to monitoring and understanding viral evolution during the ongoing pandemic. Variants first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil have spread to multiple countries. We have developed a software tool, Variant Database (VDB), for quickly examining the changing landscape of spike mutations. Using this tool, we detected an emerging lineage of viral isolates in the New York region that shares mutations with previously reported variants. The most common sets of spike mutations in this lineage (now designated as B.1.526) are L5F, T95I, D253G, E484K or S477N, D614G, and A701V. This lineage appeared in late November 2020, and isolates from this lineage account for ~25% of coronavirus genomes sequenced and deposited from New York during February 2021.
PDF Format:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...043v2.full.pdf
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