Xperts analysing Y.4.2 variant of ovid: Mandaviya

DELHI Union health minmansukh Mandaviya said uesday that a government el of experts was looking a Delta coronavirus subant, AY.4.2, that believed to triggered an increase in coronavirus disease (Cov) cases in the United King. team is investigating the Covid-19 variant AY.4.2 ... R and NCDC teams study analyse the different vari,” Mandaviya told mediaons. he UK health security cy said last week that it investigating AY.4.2 as it possibly more transmissihan Delta, though there no evidence that it caused e severe disease or rend vaccines ineffective. was designated a variant er investigation (VUC) by UK agency. atthew Bashton and Darsmith, from Northumbria ersity in Newcastle, said 75 AY lineages of the cororus have been identified till , each with different addial defining mutations in r genome. Talking about e in The Conversation, the said one of these variants AY.4 - has been steadily ing in proportion in the over the last few months, unting for 63 per cent of cases in the last 28 days. he defining change in AY.4 is the mutation A1711V, which affects the virus’s Nsp3 protein, which plays a number of roles in viral replication. However, the impact of this mutation is unknown,” Bashton and Smith said in their article.

While Bashton is Senior Fellow in Computational Biology, Smith is Professor of Bacteriophage Biology at Northumbria University.

They added that the AY.4.2 sub-lineage is defined by two additional genetic mutations, Y145H and A222V, that affect the spike protein.

AY.4.2 has grown steadily in volume and has also been observed in a few European nations like Denmark, Germany and Ireland. Till October 20, the AY.4.2 - first detected in July - had affected than 15,000 people in the UK.

Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot asked the central government on Monday to prepare and issue standard operating procedures (SOPS) to check the spread of AY.4.2.

The chief minister added that the government should learn from previous experiences and make full preparations to deal with the new variant. “Initially, there were only a few cases of the Delta variant but it did not take time to spread across the country,” he said.

INSACOG, a consortium of labs that is engaged in sequencing coronavirus variants, have said that there is no spike in Covid-19 cases due to the AY.4.2 subvariant.