Coronavirus may have mutated to become more infectious: Researchers

According to researchers in Florida, the novel coronavirus has mutated in a way that it has become more infectious than before, CNN reported.

The researchers further said that they needed more time to analyze whether the course of the pandemic has been altered due to the mutation. The mutation allows the virus not only to attach to cells more easily but to enter them more easily.

However, one scientist, not related to the study, said that it likely has. According to him, the change may explain why it grew exponentially in the United States and Latin America. It's a mutation that scientists have been worried about for weeks.

The researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida said the mutation affects the spike protein -- a structure on the outside of the virus that it uses to get into cells. If the findings get corroborated then the study would be right about the significance of the changes in the virus for the pandemic.

"Viruses with this mutation were much more infectious than those without the mutation in the cell culture system we used," Scripps Research virologist Hyeryun Choe, who helped lead the study, said in a statement as cited in the CNN report.

The World Health Organization earlier said the mutations seen so far in the new coronavirus would not affect the efficacy of vaccines under development. Last week, WHO said mutations had not made it more easily transmissible, nor had they made the virus more likely to cause serious illness.

"It is significant because it shows the virus can change, does change to its advantage and possibly to our disadvantage," William Haseltine, a virologist, biotechnology entrepreneur and chairman of Access Health International told CNN. "It has done a good job so far of adapting to human culture," he added.

"You can see in some places it doesn't get very far and in other places, it has a field day."

Scientists have been freely sharing the sequences of the virus which, like all viruses, mutates constantly. "Sometime in the middle of January, there was a change that allowed the virus to become more infectious. It doesn't mean it's more lethal," Haseltine said. "It makes it about 10 times more infectious."

However, other researchers had their reservations against the theory. In April, Bette Korber of Los Alamos National Laboratory and colleagues published their concerns, also on BioRxiv, calling the D614G mutation "of urgent concern" because it had become by far the most common strain spreading in Europe and the US.

"It began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form," they wrote.

But more work was needed to show that it just wasn't an accident that caused viruses with the D614G mutation to become the most common form.

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