Seven new coronavirus mutations identified in US

A fresh round of troubling COVID-19 mutations have been identified in the US, with scientists concerned they could make the virus more contagious.

As the mutant UK and South Africa coronavirus strains make their way across America, scientists there have made another unsettling discovery.

In a study published yesterday, a team of researchers reported that seven new variants of COVID-19 originating in the United States appear to evolving in the same direction, potentially becoming contagious threats of their own.

“There’s clearly something going on with this mutation,” Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center virologist and co-author of the study, Jeremy Kamil, told The New York Times.

While it’s unclear if the mutation makes the variants more contagious, scientists believe it may well do so because the mutation appears in a gene that influences how coronavirus enters human cells.

“I think there’s a clear signature of an evolutionary benefit,” Dr Kamil said.

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Scientists have discovered seven new variants of COVID-19 that originated in the United States. Picture: National Institutes of Health/AFP

In the report, which is yet to be peer reviewed, the scientists wrote that the mutations all affect the same stretch of the spike protein — the knoblike extension on the outside of the virus that it uses to dock onto the cells it infects.

“This stretch of Spike is important because of its proximity to a region key for virulence,” the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Vaughn Cooper, who also worked on the study, told CNN.

“We actually think these mutations are relatively rare (compared to other types of mutation), but they are disproportionately selected when they occur.”

The team has been receiving the genomic sequences deposited into global database GISAID, where scientists first noticed the rise in both the UK and South African variants.

“In late January of 2021, our two independent SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance programs, based at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Centre in Shreveport, Louisiana, each noticed increasing numbers of … viruses carrying an S: Q677P mutation, and that this variant had increased in frequency in samples collected in late 2020 to mid-January,” the new study reads.

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The team have named the seven mutations at 677 after birds, with one, called Robin 1, turning up in more than 30 states across America.

A second “first appeared from a Oct 6, 2020 sample from Alabama and is named ‘Robin 2’ owing to its similarity to the parental Robin 1 sub-lineage,” they wrote, and is mainly seen in the nation’s southeast.

A mutation called Pelican was first seen in Oregon, and has since turned up in 12 other US states as well as here in Australia, and in Denmark, Sweden and India.

University of Texas structural biologist, Jason McLellan, told The Times the study was “an important advance”.

But, he warned, “it’s tough to know what these substitutions are doing”.

“It really needs to be followed up with some additional experimental data,” he said.

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The team have named the seven mutations after birds, with one appearing in the US as well as Australia, India, Denmark and Sweden. Picture: Valerie Macon/AFP

The discovery comes after Michael Osterholm, who worked on President Joe Biden’s transition team, warned of a “hurricane” of severe cases if vaccination isn’t ramped up before “mutant” variants take hold across the US.

“We are going to see something that we have not seen in this country,” Dr Osterholm said on NBC’s Meet The Press in late January.

“England, for example, is hospitalising twice as many people as we ever had hospitalised at our highest number. You and I are sitting on this beach where it’s 70 degrees (21C), perfectly blue skies, gentle breeze. But I see that hurricane 5, category 5 or higher, 450 miles (724km) offshore.

“And, you know, telling people to evacuate on that nice blue sky day is going to be hard.

“We’re really good in this country at pumping the brakes after we wrap the car around the tree.”