When 2 coronavirus variants meet inside 1 person, a Frankenstein hybrid can be born
That's how the so-called "deltacron" variant — a mashup of delta and omicron — came to be. This process of recombining tells us a lot about the possible past and future of SARS-CoV-2.
On February 16, Scott Nguyen went hunting. And what he found is a bit surprising: a coronavirus variant that looks like a Frankenstein virus. It has the head of the omicron variant stuck onto the body of the delta variant.
Officially, Scott Nguyen is a bioinformatician at the Public Health Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He tracks emerging coronavirus variants around the city.
But on the side, Nguyen and a handful of scientists around the world have an intriguing hobby: "We're variant hunters," he says. "I think that's a pretty cool way to describe it."
Nguyen and other variant hunters
