Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Health experts have largely dismissed a reported new COVID-19 mutation said to combine elements of the Delta and Omicron variants, and said the identification likely was the result of an error during genetic sequencing.
The variant, which has been referred to as "Deltacron," was found by University of Cyprus professor Leonidos Kostrikis, who told Bloomberg News that his team found 25 cases of the mutation and submitted the findings to GISAID, an international genetic database used to track the coronavirus.
News of the purported mutation trended on social media over the weekend as health experts rejected the finding.
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an expert on COVID-19 for the World Health Organization, said that Kostrikis' finding was likely a sequencing artifact caused by the "lab contamination of Omicron fragments in a Delta specimen."
"Okay people let's make this a teachable moment, there is no such thing as Deltacron," Kuppali tweeted. "Omicron and Delta did NOT form a super variant."
Dr. Tom Peacock from Imperial College London noted that the "Deltacron" genetic sequences "do not cluster on a phylogenetic tree and have a whole Articprimer sequencing amplicon of Omicron in an otherwise Delta backbone."
Peacock said that Delta genetic sequences with "strange mutations" have been turning up since the variant emerged and are best explained as an issue exacerbated by low levels of contamination.
Dr. Adriana Heguy, a medical researcher at New York University, said researchers had found 65 samples of Omicron sequences with Delta-like mutations in New York City, but confirmed that they resulted from contamination.
"We removed them from GISAID. We did not alert the press before we did our due diligence. Some seemed totally real but when we repeated library preps, they were not," she tweeted.
Peacock added that the possible contamination issue is not related to the quality of the lab, and happens to every lab that performs genetic sequencing.
One medical expert, a researcher involved with the development of the Moderna vaccine who goes by the online pseudonym Chise, likened the error to photocopying.
"When you do a PCR run, with contamination present in your original sample, and your samples are on that same run you are simply replicating that contamination," she said. "Think of xeroxing a piece of paper with an ink spot on it. Every copy made will have that same ink spot."
Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious diseases researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, said that the evidence points to contamination rather than a true combination of the Delta and Omicron variants to create a "hybrid virus" -- which is possible with coronaviruses.
Titanji noted that recombination of the virus is believed to have happened at least once already when the Alpha variant, also known as B.1.1.7, is thought to have recombined with B.1.429 -- a variant that was found in California.
"With transmission levels of [the virus] at all-time highs globally, it is likely that recombination is occurring and may rise to levels that we start picking up these events more frequently," Titanji tweeted. "Will this lead to more concerning variants? That is possible but nobody knows."
Titanji emphasized that people shouldn't worry and avoid coining names for variants "that sound like a Transformers villain."
Kostrikis, however, continues to stand by his findings. In a statement to Bloomberg, he said his research indicates an "evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event."
"These findings refute the undocumented statements that Deltacron is a result of a technical error," he said.