Some of the details that Saskatchewan residents are accustomed to seeing on Monday were absent from the COVID-19 wastewater data. The University of Saskatchewan stated that mutations are making it more difficult to detect individual subvariants, therefore the breakdown of the variants seen in the wastewater for Saskatoon, North Battleford, and Prince Albert was removed.
According to John Giesy with USask, several strains have recently been independently accumulating or losing mutations.
“When classifying items, we follow certain guidelines. We can only use the unique mutations, which we refer to as diagnostic mutations and which we know are unique to only that variant, if a variant, for example, contains 50 mutations, many of which may not be unique.
“If there are 19 diagnostic mutations, we might only need to find 17 of them to classify a variant.
We can only see fragments of the RNA because it has been broken down, so we must use algorithms to put the fragments back together to form the complete genome.
He pointed out that while they might classify some particles in a sample as BA. 2, they might not have enough data to designate another subvariant.
The polymerase chain reaction and complementary DNA are used in these methods to identify some of the more prevalent variants, according to Giesy, but this does not imply that they can detect every subvariant.
Therefore, for an amplification, we might only be aware of BA. 2 and not all of the various sub-variants within the BA. 2 clade.
He pointed out that the BA. 2. 12. 1 variant reported in earlier papers is no longer present in Saskatchewan and said that they may have misclassified some particles because they were identifying that strain by focusing on mutations present in all BA. 2 variants.
Giesy said going forward, they’ll be either classifying a strain as BA. 5 or BA.
2, indicating that they are quite positive they are BA, that there are now only 2 subvariants in Saskatchewan.
Stop providing variation breakdowns for Saskatchewan COVID-19 wastewater figures
About Author
