Severity of current SARS-CoV-2 variants is not linked to the number of mutations

Mar 19 2024University of North Carolina at Charlotte New research from UNC Charlotte's Center for Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks has found that the two most prevalent strains of the virus that cause COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 variants BA.2.86 and JN.1, are not significantly better than their predecessor Omicron at evading immune responses and causing infections despite having a high number of mutations compared to previous variants.

There was some speculation that large numbers of new mutations in BA.2.86 and JN.1 conferred a greater ability of these variants to evade the human immune system and be more transmissible. Extensive computational analyses conducted by a team of UNC Charlotte scholars and students determined that these variants only had small, statistically insignificant changes in immune evasion and transmissibility infection capacity compared to earlier variants, including Omicron.

Daniel Janies, Co-Director of CIPHER and the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics in the College of Computing and Informatics The team found minor changes in binding affinity for neutralizing antibodies and ACE2 for BA.2.86 and JN.1 in comparison to previous SARS-CoV-2 variants. However, those changes were not statistically significant. Therefore, they concluded that BA.2.86 and JN.1 have no significant increase in immune evasion or infection capacity to previous variants.

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