Unusual symptoms, mutations: Virus keeps scientists guessing
NEWDELHI:Possibility of the novel coronavirus mutating into different strains, unknown reasons behind unusual symptoms like loss of smell, and patient samples yielding false positives in dengue diagnosis tests are some of the COVID-19 mysteries that remain unsolved, scientists say.
Ever since the novel coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, studies have pieced together important clues about COVID-19, however, scientists believe solving some important mysteries may yield a potential therapeutic against the disease which has so far infected over 5.6 million people and claimed more than 3,55,000 lives.
One of the key mysteries, related to the development of therapeutics against the novel coronavirus is the rate and significance of the mutations observed in the spike protein on its surface, virologist Upasana Ray told PTI.
Ray, a senior scientist at CSIRIndian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) in Kolkata, said the spike protein helps the virus attach to host cells and gain entry into them. In a study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, Ray and her team observed mutations in SARS-CoV-2 samples isolated from Indian patients. The researchers found changes in the folded structure of specific regions of the spike protein which they said might impact the interactions of the virus with host cells. While most of the mutations they reported were located in the S1 subunit of the spike protein, they said one of the variations in one of the isolates was more towards the end of the S2 subunit.
Another puzzling discovery related to SARS-CoV-2 is that patients infected with the virus may test positive for other antibody diagnosis tests.
In one case study, published in March in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, serum samples from a man and a woman in Singapore, who were later diagnosed with COVID-19, showed reaction to a dengue antibody test, though they did not have any history of suffering from the mosquitoborne disease. There are also unanswered questions about the biology of some unusual COVID-19 symptoms, one of them being the loss of smell reported by several patients.