The pathogen colloquially referred to as the novel coronavirus (or more accurately, SARS-CoV-2) appears to be mutating and adapting to humans, The Guardian reports. Those mutations could thwart efforts to develop a vaccine against the virus.
Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that his team has documented multiple observations of the mutations appearing in multiple labs across the world.
Studying the genetic structure of 5,349 coronavirus genomes, researchers around the world observed two mutations. One was present in 788 virions around the world, the other in 32.
Specifically, the mutations change the physiological structure of the “spike protein,” one of the features of the virus that makes it so easy to spread, such that it traveled all the way across the world in a matter of months. That spike protein allows it to bind more easily to human cells than other viruses in the same family.
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