Just a few weeks ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the detection of a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, known as XE. It is the last of the variants to emerge, after the expansion of Omicron, with a transmission capacity superior to the previous variants.
This variant, a recombinant type, has symptoms very similar to those of Omicron: fever, cough, headache, runny nose and fatigue, according to data analyzed by the United Kingdom Health Safety Agency, reports the Spanish newspaper AS.
The XE variant, according to the newspaper “La Presse”, comes from the mixture of two strains of the Omicron line, BA.1 and BA.2. The XE attracts attention because it circulates a lot in England, where there are 1125 cases. Other countries, including Canadahave also detected it on their territory. “The more transmission you are going to have in the population, the more likely you are going to be that a person is co-infected by different lineages”, specifies Inès Levade, scientific advisor specialized in the Laboratoire de santé publique du Québec and coordinator of the committee of experts on the genomic monitoring of SARS-CoV-2. All known recombinant variants have a name whose first letter is X. The first is called XA and the last is XT.
What is a recombinant variant?
It is the result of the fusion of two existing strains. This phenomenon occurs when a person is infected by two lineages at the same time. ” It happens. It’s already arrived. It will continue to happen”, says André Veillette, immunologist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute. Indeed, when viruses attack a cell, they can exchange parts of their genome and pick up mutations from each other. “There are many viruses that use the recombination method”specifies Alain Lamarre, professor-researcher specializing in immunology and virology at the National Institute for Scientific Research.