Deltacron

Is deltacron a new mutation with the transmissibility of omicron and the pathogenesis of delta?

Cyprus

Not a new form of coronavirus

Recombination event

Lab contamination

Prof Leondios Kostrikis, professor of biological sciences,University of Cyprus, Head of the Laboratory of Biotechnology and Molecular Virology

Suggested delta and omicron variants had amalgamated

There are currently omicron and delta co-infections and we found this strain that is a combination of these two

25 sequences were subsequently submitted to GISAID

Dr Thomas Peacock, Imperial College London, Department of Infectious Disease

November, very small cluster,

really awful spike mutation profile

B.1.1.529, later omicron

Deltacron genetic profile

Looks to be quite clearly contamination

Several colleagues

almost definitely contamination

doesn’t look like a real recombinant

Dr Simon Clarke, University of Reading

It’s perfectly possible for different versions of the virus that causes Covid-19 to combine sections of their genetic material,

creating a recombinant,

which is a genetic mosaic of the different variants

with altered characteristics,

but they contain a number of telltale signs

and ‘deltacron’ just doesn’t have any

Instead, its proposed genetic code looks more like what would happen if you contaminated one sample with another

That could have happened at any point between sampling and sequencing in the laboratory

and I strongly suspect this is what has happened.

New variants will continue to come along, but I don’t think this is one.

Deltacron’s genetic code

Scars of a notoriously faulty primer

V3 72 amplicon

As of Monday morning

UKHSA no new variants under surveillance

Prof Leondios Kostrikis

indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event

Deltacron infection is higher among patients hospitalised for Covid-19 than among non-hospitalised patients,

so that rules out the contamination hypothesis

the samples were processed in multiple sequencing procedures in more than one country.

And at least one sequence from Israel deposited in a global database exhibits genetic characteristics of Deltacron

Professor Nick Loman, microbial genomics professor University of Birmingham (UK)

While a recombinant form of Delta and Omicron would not be a complete surprise,

the finding from Cyprus is more likely a “technical artefact” that arose in the process of sequencing the viral genome