News of a ‘super variant’ combining Delta and Omicron spread rapidly last week, but researchers say it never existed and the sequences may have resulted from contamination.
Credit: T. Narayan/Bloomberg/Getty
Kostrikis says that aspects of his original hypothesis have been misconstrued, and that — despite the confusing name that some of the media took to mean that the sequences were those of a Delta–Omicron recombinant virus — he never said that the sequences represented a hybrid of the two. Sequencing any genome depends on primers — short bits of manufactured DNA that serve as the starting point for sequencing by binding to the target sequence.
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