Experts say that an alleged hybrid coronavirus mutation dubbed Deltacron reportedly discovered in a Cyprus lab is most likely the result of lab contamination and not a new worrying variant.
Cypriot media reported the discovery describing it as having the genetic background of the Delta variant along with some of the mutations of Omicron.
Jeffrey Barrett, the head of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, says the alleged mutations are located on a part of the genome that is vulnerable to an error in certain sequencing procedures.
He says this is almost certainly not a biological recombinant of the Delta and Omicron lineages.