Ebola Is Rapidly Mutating As It Spreads Across West Africa

An international team – 20 researchers working around the clock – sequenced DNA from 78 human subjects infected with Ebola and report the virus is mutating quickly. “The Ebola genome is incredibly simple,” writes Michaeleen Doucleff for NPR in the United States, based on an interview with a lead author on the study, Pardis Sabeti. computational biologist at Harvard University. Ebola has seven genes while humans have 20,000. The virus accumulates mutations in humans about twice as quickly as it does in humans; mutations could make the virus more transmissible or pathogenic. The data indicate that the outbreak started after one person caught Ebola from an animal, Doucleff notes, and “Then the virus has been spreading through human-to-human transmission – not through infected bushmeat, or wild game, as first thought.” Five researchers died while working on the project. Experimental drugs and vaccines are based on the virus’s DNA sequence, so time is of the essence. – YaleGlobal