We don’t know if B117 is more deadly, but we do have evidence it’s transmitting fast. Failure to react could be catastrophic
- Alan McNally is a professor in microbial genomics at the University of Birmingham
On Friday 11 December I was alerted to the fact that a large number of the samples showing positive in our Covid-19 testing laboratory in Birmingham were unusual. Like the other Lighthouse laboratories, dedicated to testing samples from the wider public, we are on the lookout for the presence of three particular genes, with a positive Covid-19 result requiring clean detection of two of the three.
That Friday around 25% of all our positives were completely missing one of those genes – the S gene, which encodes the spike protein of the virus and is essential for viral attachment and entry into cells. It is not unusual to see some S gene drop-outs in positive samples, but usually in around 1-2% of them, not in 25%. At the same time this phenomenon was also observed in the Lighthouse lab in Milton Keynes, and communication was instigated with the Covid-19 Genomics UK (CoG) consortium, and our observation was reported to the national testing programme.
