Cypriot scientist Leonidos Kostrikis said this Friday in a television interview that he discovered a new variant that combines the delta and omicron strains of COVID-19, which has been named deltacron.
Other scientists, however, have speculated that the findings of Leonidos Kostrikis are the result of laboratory contamination, however, the Cypriot defended this Sunday his claim that there is a new strain of COVID-19.In a statement emailed to the Bloomberg news service on Sunday, Kostrikis said the cases he has identified “indicate evolutionary pressure on an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not the result of a single recombination event”.
infection by deltacron is higher among patients hospitalized for COVID-19 than among non-hospitalized patients, thus that the hypothesis of contamination is ruled out, defended Kostrikis, professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus and director of the Laboratory of Biotechnology and Molecular Virology. “In addition, the samples were processed in various sequencing procedures in more than one country. And at least one sequence from Israel deposited in a global database exhibits genetic characteristics of deltacron”, he argued to Bloomberg.”These findings refute undocumented claims that deltacron is the result of a technical error,” Kostrikis said.Nick Loman , a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Birmingham in England, believes that while a recombinant form of delta and omicron would not be a complete surprise, the The Cyprus finding is more likely a “technical artifact” that arose in the process of sequencing the viral genome.Cypriot Health Minister Michael Hadjipantela said on Sunday that the new variant is not a cause for concern and that more details will be given at a press conference this week.In Mexico, the health authorities have not ruled so far on the existence of a variant that responds to the name of deltacron.If it is confirmed that deltacron is a new strain, it would follow the recently discovered in France last Tuesday, the strain call B.1.640.2.
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