Claims of lab contamination
The identification of Deltacron led to widespread news coverage and much debate on social media, but experts have questioned the findings.
Dr. Jeffrey Barrett, Director of the COVID-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, believes the findings are due to a lab error.
“This is almost certainly not a biological recombinant of the Delta and Omicron lineages,” he says. “The apparent Omicron mutations are located precisely and exclusively in a section of the sequence encoding the spike gene (amino acids 51 to 143) affected by a technological artifact in certain sequencing procedures.”
Writing on Twitter, Dr. Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London in the U.K, also dismissed the findings, saying that “[t]he Cypriot ‘Deltacron’ sequences reported by several large media outlets look to be quite clearly contamination.”
In a separate tweet, he nevertheless clarified that this was not due to poor lab practice, stating that it “happens to every sequencing lab occasionally.”
The evolutionary evidence appears to back up their comments. Several experts have stated that if Deltacron was truly a new recombinant variant, samples would cluster on the same branch of SARS-CoV-2’s phylogenetic treeTrusted Source.
However, Deltacron appears randomly on several branches, which experts say is a sure sign of contamination.
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