(ANSA) – ROME, JANUARY 04 – It could have been a spillback, that is a return of the SarsCov2 virus from mice to humans, that caused many mutations to the Omicron variant to accumulate rapidly. This is the theory that the researchers of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are working on. “Our results – explain the Chinese researchers – suggest that Omicron’s progenitor passed from humans to mice, rapidly accumulated mutations favorable to the infection of that host, then returned to humans, indicating an interspecies evolutionary trajectory for the Omicron epidemic “.
In a work published in the scientific journal Journal of Genetics and Genomics 45 mutations that Omicron acquired from diverging from lineage B.1.1 were analyzed. And this is where they found that Omicron’s spike protein sequence underwent stronger selection than that of any SarsCov2 variant. This, according to scholars, could suggest the possibility of a new “leap” from man to animals and then from these again to man. The molecular spectrum of mutations acquired from Omicron’s progenitor was found to be “significantly different” from the spectrum of viruses that evolved in human patients, but resembled the spectra associated with the evolution of the virus in the cellular environment of rats. Furthermore, mutations in Omicron’s spike protein significantly overlapped SarsCov2 mutations known to promote adaptation in mice.
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