Monkeypox cases continue to rise throughout the world, with more than 13,000 cases reported so far. The virus circulating in the current outbreak has mutated 50 times in the past four years.
Monkeypox cases continue to rise throughout the world, with more than 13,000 cases reported so far. The virus, which is rarely lethal but causes painful sores on the skin, normally lives in rodents and other animals but is now spreading rapidly among humans around the world.
The monkeypox virus is made of DNA, which tends to mutate less often than RNA in viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID. On average, poxviruses—a family that includes orthopoxviruses such as monkeypox and smallpox—tend to mutate once per year, wrote biophysicist Richard Neher of the University of Basel in Switzerland on Twitter.
This pattern suggested that the virus was being edited by a human protein called APOBEC3, which tends to switch Cs to Ts. APOBEC3 can edit the genomes of many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, and the sheer number of edits indicated that this human protein had been tweaking the monkeypox virus for a long time. That aligns with other evidence suggesting that the disease had been spreading among humans in Africa or Europe for years before outbreaks were detected in the latter continent in May 2022.
Orthopoxviruses seem to be able to survive a great deal of mutation. One study that analyzed smallpox in the skeletons of sixth-century Vikings found numerous genes that are inactivated in modern smallpox strains, suggesting that gene deletions are a normal part of how orthopoxviruses and host species adapt to one another.
If mutations that helped the virus did appear, Smith says, scientists would be able to spot them. He and many others have spent decades studying the smallpox genome, whose central region is 96 percent identical to that of monkeypox. They know which proteins allow the virus to escape the immune system, for instance, or to spread more easily. “We know what to look for and haven’t seen it yet,” Smith says.
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