A team of scientists from the University of California Santa Cruz, USA, recently identified a novel variant (B.1.x) of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that might be circulating in at least 20 US states and six countries globally. The mutations found in this variant are also present in other known variants of concern (VOCs). Crucially, because of the presence of a large deletion mutation, the sequence of B.1.x has been rejected by automated sequence checking tools used in publicly available genomic sequence databases. The study is currently available on the bioRxiv* preprint server.
