Deltacron 

Is deltacron a new mutation with the transmissibility of omicron and the pathogenesis of delta?
www.telegraph....
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
www.gisaid.org
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
www.gov.uk/gov...
www.gov.uk/gov...
UKHSA no new variants under surveillance
Prof Leondios Kostrikis
www.scmp.com/n...
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