Anyone curious to see evolution playing out in real time need look no further than NextStrain.org, a website that depicts the ever-sprouting family trees of different pathogens residing in the human population.
Maintained by a collective of computational biologists, NextStrain is currently displaying more than 3,500 genetically distinct branches of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Those are just a selection of all the variations that have been seen. More are showing up all the time, thanks to the immense opportunity for diversification that the virus has gained by infecting about 80 million people this year.
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“When you start to see parallel evolution of certain mutations that rise in frequency, then that’s a sign that there’s a real biological advantage to them,” said Jeffrey Joy, a research scientist in evolutionary genetics at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.
On Saturday, Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s Associate Chief Medical Officer, announced that a couple living in Durham Region, east of Toronto, have the U.K. variant of the virus. This marks the variant’s first known appearance in North America. The couple did not travel which means that the variant has made one or more jumps since arriving, a situation that could potentially indicate more general community spread.