By Estelle Shirbon and Alistair Smout
LONDON (Reuters) – The “major concern” coronavirus mutation, which could impact the vaccine’s effectiveness, occurred spontaneously in the UK variant, an outbreak medicine professor on a panel advising on Tuesday said. the British government.
The E484K mutation, which occurs in the virus’s spike protein, is the same change observed in the South African and Brazilian variants that caused international concern.
Several laboratory studies have found that vaccines and antibody therapy are less effective against the South African variant.
In contrast, early evidence showed that vaccines worked so well against the UK variant, called B.1.1.7, that it originally did not have the E484K mutation.
“The most worrying mutation, which we call E484K, also occurred spontaneously in the new Kent strain in parts of the country,” said Calum Semple, a member of BBC Radio’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, referring to the county of southern England. where the UK variant was first detected.
Concern over the South African variant has prompted British authorities to launch a mass door-to-door testing campaign, targeting 80,000 people living in areas where cases of the variant have been found in people with no connection to South Africa.
The fact that the E484K mutation occurred spontaneously in Britain had already been reported in a technical briefing published by Public Health England, but this had not been widely noticed outside scientific circles.
The report said the mutation was detected in 11 genomes B.1.1.7, possibly as a result of “more than one acquisition event”, suggesting that the 11 genomes were not all linked together and that the mutation may have occurred spontaneously in separate locations.
The name E484K, in general terms, is like the map coordinates. The number 484 is the exact location of the mutation, the letter E is the amino acid that it was originally and the letter K is the amino acid that it mutated to.
“Unfortunately, the lack of control of these different variants in the UK can lead this population to become a melting pot for different emerging variants of SARS-VOC-2 / COVID-19,” said Julian Tang, virologist at the University of Leicester.
(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon and Alistair Smout; Editing by Nick Macfie and Gareth Jones)
Originally published