Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation(BMC) has announced that a woman with a travel history to South Africa may have been infected with the newly-discovered \u2018XE\u2019 variant of the coronavirus.<\/span><\/p>\n XE is a sub-variant of <\/span>Omicron<\/b> which caused the third wave of Covid-19.<\/span><\/p>\n First Discovered in:<\/b> XE was first discovered in the United Kingdom in January 2022 and so far more than 600 samples of XE have been found in different countries.<\/span><\/p>\n The Omicron variant has two prominent sub-variants, called BA.1 and BA.2. There is also a BA.3 sub-variant as well, but that is less common.<\/span><\/p>\n The XE variant is what is called a \u2018recombinant\u2019 variant. This means it contains the mutations found in BA.1 as well as BA.2 varieties of Omicron.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Apart from the errors in the virus genome, another process through which the virus increases its genetic diversity is recombination.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Recombination occurs in extremely rare situations. In this, two different lineages of the virus co-infect the same cell in the host and exchange fragments of their individual genomes. This generates a descendent variant having mutations that occurred in both the original lineages of the virus.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Recombination of lineages happens in a variety of other viruses, including those that cause influenza, as well as other coronaviruses.<\/span><\/p>\n As of now, there is no evidence to show that the XE variant is significantly different from the other varieties of Omicron.<\/span><\/p>\n XE could be about 10% more transmissible than the dominant BA.2 variant. But that is a very small advantage that XE has, and even this has not been confirmed as of now.<\/span><\/p>\n Source: <\/b>This post is based on the article<\/span> \u201cExplained: What is XE variant of coronavirus, and why you need not worry about it\u201d <\/b>published in<\/span> Indian Express <\/b>on 7th April 2022.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is the News? Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation(BMC) has announced that a woman with a travel history to South Africa may have been infected with the newly-discovered \u2018XE\u2019 variant of the coronavirus. What is XE Variant? XE is a sub-variant of Omicron which caused the third wave of Covid-19. First Discovered in: XE was first discovered… Continue reading Explained: What is XE variant of coronavirus, and why you need not worry about it<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1566,1738,9],"tags":[10500],"class_list":["post-178056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-factly-articles","category-science-and-technology-daily-factly-articles","category-public","tag-indian-express","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704863865},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What is XE Variant?<\/b><\/h5>\n
How was XE Variant formed? <\/b><\/h5>\n
What is a Recombinant Variant? <\/b><\/h5>\n
Is there a threat from XE? <\/b><\/h5>\n