In the seemingly never-ending fight against COVID-19, a scientist in Cyprus has discovered what he claims to be a new strain of the virus – something he's dubbed 'Deltacron' for its shared characteristics of both the Delta and Omicron variants.
Small update: the Cypriot 'Deltacron' sequences reported by several large media outlets look to be quite clearly contamination - they do not cluster on a phylogenetic tree and have a whole Artic primer sequencing amplicon of Omicron in an otherwise Delta backbone. — Tom Peacock (@PeacockFlu) January 8, 2022
However, laying doubts to those claims are several virologists, who think the Cypriot may have mistaken lab contamination with a new variant.
"The Cypriot 'Deltacron' sequences reported by several large media outlets look to be quite clearly contamination — they do not cluster on a phylogenetic tree and have a whole Artic primer sequencing amplicon of Omicron in an otherwise Delta backbone," said virologist Tom Peacock on Twitter.
Jury's still out, for now.
Leondios Kostrikis, professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus, says that he and his team have detected roughly 25 cases of Deltacron, mainly in patients already hospitalized with COVID-19, as opposed to people who haven't yet required serious medical attention.
IMAGE: Bloomberg
And it's precisely this finding that Kostrikis believes rules out the possibility of lab contamination. In his words, the newly-detected cases "indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event".
Adding more weight to these claims is a sequencing procedure that was done in Israel, which does show the genetic characteristics of Deltacron as laid out by Kostrikis and his team.
However, this strain (if verified on a wider scale), isn't a completely new virus that coincidentally has similar characteristics to Delta and Omicron. Instead, Kostrikis describes it as a strain that has “Omicron-like genetic signatures within the Delta genomes”.
"These findings refute the undocumented statements that Deltacron is a result of a technical error," Kostrikis said.
IMAGE: Bernama / New Straits Times
According to Nick Loman, a microbial genomics professor at the University of Birmingham, recombinants (referring to cells infected by more than one virus strain) are technically possible and may not pose a huge surprise if they do end up occurring in the form of a Delta/Omicron strain.
However, he feels the Cyprus discovery might just be the result of a 'technical artefact' that occurred while the viral genome was being sequenced.
For now, it's too early to tell what kind of impact Deltacron will have.
"We will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail," Kostrikis said.
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