Usually, such random mutations do not benefit the virus or raise the concerns of scientists monitoring these changes. “When a virus copies itself, it doesn’t always make perfect copies,” Weissman explains.
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Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 continuously evolve due to occasional mutations in the genetic code that may occur when they replicate. Ghafari graduated from Emory in 2018 with a masters in physics.Īdditional authors of the paper include Aris Katzourakis, a professor of evolution and genomics at the University of Oxford Qihan Liu, an Emory graduate student in physics and Emory undergraduate Arushi Dhillon. “In many cases they may be asymptomatic and not even realize that they are infected with COVID although they are actively shedding the virus.” “A key take-home message is that it is important to find these individuals who are chronically infected and provide support for them to recover,” adds Mahan Ghafari, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. “Rather than evolving from transmission chains of acute COVID infections in hundreds of millions of people, our results show that the variants of concern come from rare cases when someone may have an active infection for months,” says Daniel Weissman, a corresponding author and Emory professor of biology and physics focused on quantitative evolutionary theory. Frontiers in Virology published the findings by scientists at Emory University and the University of Oxford. The coronavirus variants of concern are emerging from chronic, long-term COVID-19 infections in people who may be immune compromised and unable to clear the virus, a new study strongly suggests.
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