The omicron variant of the coronavirus has alarmed many scientists because of the sheer number of genetic mutations it carries — about 50 in all, including at least 26 that are unique to it. But more does not necessarily mean worse: Mutations sometimes work together to make a virus more fearsome, but they may also cancel one another out.
Still, this phenomenon, called epistasis, is why scientists are reluctant to speculate on omicron’s attributes, even though individual mutations in the variant are associated with greater transmissibility or with an ability to dodge the body’s immune defenses.“It is important to get a sense of the full virus,” said Penny Moore, a virus expert at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa.
It’s a lesson researchers learned last year, when the beta variant emerged in South Africa. They estimated that variant’s ability to evade immunity based on one particular mutation, E484K. But beta also had two other mutations that turned out to affect sensitivity to vaccines. Omicron carries a mutation called N501Y, which is thought to allow the virus to bind to human cells more tightly. This mutation was also present in the alpha variant and was linked to its contagiousness.“Nonetheless, it ended up being delta, which doesn’t have that particular mutation, that was more even more transmissible than alpha,” Bloom said. “That’s because delta had other mutations that enhance transmissibility.
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