A new study published in Science confirms that SARS-CoV-2 has mutated in a way that’s enabled it to spread quickly around the world, but the spike mutation may also make the virus more susceptible to a vaccine.
The new strain of coronavirus, called D614G, emerged in Europe and has become the most common in the world. Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows the D614G strain replicates faster and is more transmissible than the virus, originating in China, that spread in the beginning of the pandemic.
There were bright spots in the study findings: While the D614G strain spreads faster, in animal studies it was not associated with more severe disease, and the strain is slightly more sensitive to neutralization by antibody drugs.
The study published Nov. 12 provides some of the first concrete findings about how SARS-CoV-2 is evolving.
“The D614G virus outcompetes and outgrows the ancestral strain by about 10-fold and replicates extremely efficiently in primary nasal epithelial cells, which are a potentially important site for person-to-person transmission,” said Ralph Baric, professor of epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC School of Medicine.
unc.edu/posts/2020/11/12/co...
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