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After Cyprus and Great Britain, France has detected around ten cases of people infected with what appears to be a recombination of Delta and Omicron.
Deltacron is said to come from people who were simultaneously infected with Delta and Omicron.
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The name appeared in January 2021. A Cypriot laboratory announced that it had detected a hybrid variant of Delta and Omicron, which it named Deltacron. This news had been greeted with great skepticism by many scientists, who considered it more likely that this mutation resulted from contamination in the laboratory at the time of sequencing. And that it was therefore not a question of what is called recombination, or the genetic sharing of information between two viruses. The Cypriot professor defended himself by explaining that his 25 samples had not been sequenced at the same time, nor in the same place, which ruled out laboratory error.
But subsequently, a first case of Deltacron was spotted in Great Britain, then 10 others in France, as well as 4 in Denmark and one in the Netherlands, while the team of Cypriot researchers reported having discovered 52 new cases . Great Britain and then the WHO have now classified it in the list of variants to follow.
It has been circulating in France since mid-January
For Leondios Kostrikis, the Cypriot professor behind the discovery, Deltacron would not be a recombination, but the natural evolution of an old strain of the virus, he explained in January to Bloomberg. Public Health France does not seem to agree. She explains that the first four cases studied in France are indeed recombinants. A recombinant is a new virus that forms in a patient who has been infected with multiple virus strains simultaneously, in this case Delta and Omicron.
“The majority of its genome corresponds to the AY.4 sublineage of Delta and a large portion of the S gene (encoding the Spike protein) corresponds to the BA.1 sublineage of Omicron”, writes the French national health agency. . This combinator seems to be distinguished by three mutations which could thus help to distinguish it. And this is how on February 21, 10 cases carrying these three mutations were detected in France. They came from different regions and the oldest dated back to January 17. This may suggest “that this recombinant has been potentially circulating at very low levels since mid-January” in France, concludes Public Health. Investigations continue, but as of February 21, there are also 59 cases of “probable co-infections” in the country, explains “The Dispatch”.
For the moment, we still know nothing about the virulence or the dangerousness of this recombinant. But it has now caught the attention of health authorities.