Are You Concerned About Ebola?

[magical thyme]

38. Ebola Is Rapidly Mutating As It Spreads Across West Africa

The short answer is the team of virologists headed by Harvard. I believe it's the same time that Dr. Sheik Humarr Khanik was part of.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/08/28/343734184/ebola-is-rapidly-mutating-as-it-spreads-across-west-africa

...For starters, the data show that the virus is rapidly accumulating new mutations as it spreads through people. "We've found over 250 mutations that are changing in real time as we're watching," Sabeti says.

While moving through the human population in West Africa, she says, the virus has been collecting mutations about twice as quickly as it did while circulating among animals in the past decade or so.

"The more time you give a virus to mutate and the more human-to-human transmission you see," she says, "the more opportunities you give it to fall upon some [mutation] that could make it more easily transmissible or more pathogenic."

Sabeti says she doesn't know if that's happening yet. But the rapid change in the virus' genome could weaken the tools researchers have to detect Ebola or, potentially, to treat patients....

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Ebola virus mutating rapidly as it spreads
http://www.nature.com/news/ebola-virus-mutating-rapidly-as-it-spreads-1.15777

The sequence data, which were made publicly available by 31 July, constitute the largest collection of genetic information on Ebola ever to be released. To get them, the group collected leftover blood from samples taken for diagnostic tests in Kenema. They then used a chemical solution to deactivate the Ebola viruses, and sent the samples to be sequenced at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The researchers sequenced the viral genomes from each sample an average of more than 2,000 times, allowing them track how the virus mutated as it spread from patient to patient. In April, researchers reported2 that they had sequenced data from Guinean patients' viruses. That team, however, produced one composite viral genome sequence for each patient, rather than individually sequencing different copies of the virus found in each patient, as in the work reported today.

Back to the beginning

By comparing their data to the Guinean sequence data, Goba's team confirmed that Ebola was probably imported to Sierra Leone by 12 people who attended the funeral in Guinea, and that the West African outbreak originated in a single event in which the virus passed from an animal into a person. Further comparisons suggest that the virus that caused the outbreak separated from those that caused past Ebola outbreaks about 10 years ago. It had accumulated more than 395 mutations between that time and June, when the researchers collected the last samples included in today's analysis.

The virus amassed 50 mutations during its first month, the researchers found. They say there is no sign that any of these mutations have contributed to the unprecedented size of the outbreak by changing the characteristics of the Ebola virus — for instance, its ability to spread from person to person or to kill infected patients. But others are eager to examine these questions.