What is 'Deltacron' and Is It Fatal?

'Deltacron' probably doesn't exist, according to scientists who have called for calm over reports of a new Covid hybrid. 

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Researchers in Cyprus over the weekend claimed 25 patients had tested positive for a super-variant. 

One academic claimed the samples he'd seen carried a similar genetic structure to Omicron — but also shared quirks seen with the Delta strain. 

Dubbed 'Deltacron', news of the potential strain spread rapidly on social media.

But leading virologists have now poured cold water over the findings, insisting it is probably just a result of laboratory contamination. 

They argued fragments of Delta samples may well have been leftover from previous sequencing, leading to the appearance of a new variant. 

Dr Jeffrey Barrett, director of the Covid Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, dismissed fears the two strains had merged. 'This is almost certainly not a biological recombinant of the Delta and Omicron lineages,' he said. 

Dr Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases physician who works with the World Health Organization, agreed that it most likely a lab error. 

'Deltacron is not real and is likely due to sequencing artifact (lab contamination of Omicron sequence fragments in a Delta specimen),' she said.

'Let's not merge of names of infectious diseases and leave it to celebrity couples.'

Dr Thomas Peacock, a virologist from Imperial College London, said the genetical make-up of the 'Deltacron' sequences 'look to be quite clearly contamination'.

But European Molecular Biology Laboratory deputy director general Professor Ewan Birney admitted it was possible, but unlikely, that the variants had merged. 

He said that a 'key first step' was to confirm if this recombination has actually occurred or if the sequences are a lab error.

Meanwhile, the Cypriot team who discovered the variant have hit back at reports that their findings are untrue, insisting they have found a new variant.

Dr Leonidos Kostrikis, of the Laboratory of Biotechnology and Molecular Virology in Cyprus ,told Bloomberg that the cases he had found 'indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event'.

As part of his argument, he claimed that the samples were processed in multiple sequencing procedures in more than one country with at least one from Israel.

'These findings refute the undocumented statements that Deltacron is a result of a technical error,' he said. 

While a crossbreeding of Omicron and Delta is technically possible, virologists say it would be incredibly unlikely.

Recombination events, as they are scientifically known, could only occur if someone was infected with two different lineages simultaneously.

If viruses from both strains infected the same cell then they can, in theory, swap their genetic code and make a new version of the virus.

But researchers have said such an event would require very specific conditions and the coincidence of a number of uncontrollable events. 

Additionally, there would be no guarantee even if it did occur that it would result in a more dangerous strain.

However, MPs were warned about the prospect of a so-called Deltacron variant just last month.

Covid vaccine maker Moderna's chief medical officer Dr Paul Burton warned it was 'certainly possible'.  

Only three strains created by viruses swapping genes have been officially recorded over the course of the pandemic, but these have faded away rapidly.

In one case, Alpha merged with B.1.177 in late January 2021. It only led to 44 cases in the UK before disappearing. 

Instead of recombination, new Covid variants generally emerge on their own. SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, constantly mutates and can pick up genetic quirks as it replicates.  

In most cases the mutations are harmless, but occasionally they can make the virus more transmissible or better able to evade vaccines as is the case with the Omicron variant. 

Omicron has 32 mutations on its spike proteins alone, nearly five times more than Delta.

Claims of the emergence of a new Deltacron variant came a lab in Cyprus which has reportedly submitted its findings to GISAID, an international database that tracks different Covid variants and their spread. 

Cyprus currently has one of the highest Covid cases per head of population rates in the world.  

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Stats compiled by Oxford University-backed research team Our World in Data shows that as of yesterday Cyprus recorded 5050 daily Covid cases per million people.

This is nearly double the amount of the UK which recorded 2,607 daily cases per million people on the same date. 

This article has been adapted from its original source.