By Estelle Shirbon and Alistair Smout
LONDON (Reuters) – The coronavirus mutation “most worrying” that could affect the vaccine’s effectiveness has occurred spontaneously in the British variant, said a professor of outbreak medicine, who is part of a panel advising the British government , Said Tuesday.
The E484K mutation, which occurs on the vein protein of the virus, is the same change seen in the South African and Brazilian variants that has 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 work just as well against the British variant, called B.1.1.7, which originally did not have the E484K mutation.
“The most worrying mutation, which we call E484K, has also occurred spontaneously in the new Kent tribe in parts of the country,” Calum Semple, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergency, told BBC Radio said with reference to the South English county where the British variant was first detected.
Concerns about the South African variant have prompted the authorities in England to launch a mass test drive from door to door, targeting 80,000 people living in areas where cases of the variant have been found in people without ties to South Africa.
The fact that the E484K mutation occurred spontaneously in Britain has already been reported in a technical briefing published by Public Health England, but it has not been widely noticed outside scientific circles.
According to the report, the mutation was detected in 11 B.1.1.7 genomes, possibly due to “more than one acquisition event”, indicating that the 11 genomes were not all linked to each other and that the mutation may have occurred spontaneously during separate locations.
The name E484K, according to laymen, is like map coordinates. The number 484 is the exact location of the mutation, the letter E is the amino acid where it was originally and the letter K is the amino acid after which it mutated.
“Unfortunately, the lack of control of these different variants in the UK could lead to this population becoming a melting pot for different emerging SARS-COV-2 / COVID-19 variants,” said Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester, said.
(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon and Alistair Smout; Editing by Nick Macfie and Gareth Jones)
Originally published