Mary Wilson
Well-known member
27 May 2022
Max Kozlov
It’s been three weeks since public-health authorities confirmed a case of monkeypox in the United Kingdom. Since then, more than 400 confirmed or suspected cases have emerged in at least 20 non-African nations, including Canada, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom — the largest outbreak ever outside of Africa. The situation has scientists on alert because the monkeypox virus has emerged in separate populations across multiple countries, and there is no obvious link between many of the clusters, raising the possibility of undetected, local transmission of the virus.
“We need to act quickly and decisively, but there is still a lot to be learned,” says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a decade.
Nature outlines some of the key questions about the recent outbreaks that researchers are racing to answer.
How did the current outbreaks start?
Since the latest outbreaks began, researchers have sequenced viral genomes collected from people with monkeypox in countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and the United States. The most important insight they have gained so far is that each of the sequences closely resembles that of a monkeypox strain found in western Africa. ...
Can a genetic change in the virus explain the latest outbreaks?
Understanding whether there is a genetic basis for the virus’s unprecedented spread outside Africa will be incredibly difficult, says Elliot Lefkowitz, a computational virologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has studied poxvirus evolution. Researchers are still struggling to characterize precisely which genes are responsible for the higher virulence and transmissibility of the central African strain, compared with the west African one, more than 17 years after they identified a difference between the two.
One reason for this is that poxvirus genomes contain many mysteries, Lefkowitz says. The monkeypox genome is enormous relative to that of many other viruses — it is more than six times as large as the genome for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. That means they’re at least “six times harder to analyse”, says Rachel Roper, a virologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
Palacios says another reason is that few resources have been dedicated to genomic surveillance efforts in Africa, where monkeypox has been a public-health concern for many years. So virologists are flying somewhat blind right now, because they have few sequences to which they can compare the new monkeypox sequences, he says. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01493-6
Max Kozlov
It’s been three weeks since public-health authorities confirmed a case of monkeypox in the United Kingdom. Since then, more than 400 confirmed or suspected cases have emerged in at least 20 non-African nations, including Canada, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom — the largest outbreak ever outside of Africa. The situation has scientists on alert because the monkeypox virus has emerged in separate populations across multiple countries, and there is no obvious link between many of the clusters, raising the possibility of undetected, local transmission of the virus.
“We need to act quickly and decisively, but there is still a lot to be learned,” says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a decade.
Nature outlines some of the key questions about the recent outbreaks that researchers are racing to answer.
How did the current outbreaks start?
Since the latest outbreaks began, researchers have sequenced viral genomes collected from people with monkeypox in countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and the United States. The most important insight they have gained so far is that each of the sequences closely resembles that of a monkeypox strain found in western Africa. ...
Can a genetic change in the virus explain the latest outbreaks?
Understanding whether there is a genetic basis for the virus’s unprecedented spread outside Africa will be incredibly difficult, says Elliot Lefkowitz, a computational virologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has studied poxvirus evolution. Researchers are still struggling to characterize precisely which genes are responsible for the higher virulence and transmissibility of the central African strain, compared with the west African one, more than 17 years after they identified a difference between the two.
One reason for this is that poxvirus genomes contain many mysteries, Lefkowitz says. The monkeypox genome is enormous relative to that of many other viruses — it is more than six times as large as the genome for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. That means they’re at least “six times harder to analyse”, says Rachel Roper, a virologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
Palacios says another reason is that few resources have been dedicated to genomic surveillance efforts in Africa, where monkeypox has been a public-health concern for many years. So virologists are flying somewhat blind right now, because they have few sequences to which they can compare the new monkeypox sequences, he says. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01493-6