“We detected a new VOI in three incoming travelers from Tanzania who were tested together at the airport in mid-February. The three genomes from these passengers were almost identical and presented highly divergent sequences within the A lineage. The GISAID database contains nine other sequences reported to be sampled from cases involving travel from Tanzania, two of which are basal to the three sampled in Angola”
This new VOI, temporarily designated A.VOI.V2, has 31 amino acid substitutions (11 in spike) and three deletions (all in spike) (Figure 1C & 1D). The spike mutations include three substitutions in the receptor-binding domain (R346K, T478R and E484K); five substitutions and three deletions in the N-terminal domain, some of which are within the antigenic supersite (Y144?, R246M, SYL247-249? and W258L)4; and two substitutions adjacent to the S1/S2 cleavage site (H655Y and P681H). Several of these mutations are present in other VOCs/VOIs and are evolving under positive selection.
