But one line stuck out: It looked like a swath of multiple mutations. It was Friday, November 19. Moyo’s lab in Gaborone, Botswana, a city just over the northern border of South Africa, had been sequencing the genomes of about 95 coronavirus samples every week to track mutations, the natural changes that occur in virus genes. But he’d never seen anything like this before. While other Harvard affiliates, including the Broad Institute and the major Boston hospitals, have seized the limelight in coping with COVID-19, this little-known African outpost would end up playing a critical role as the first lab to identify the new variant that has transfixed the world. “This sequence really shocked us,” Moyo, the laboratory director, said in an interview Monday. He showed it to a colleague, who agreed it looked like nothing seen before in Botswana.
Could it have come from somewhere else? The Delta variant hit the US economy hard. Will Omicron pack a similar punch? Over the next few days, comparing the findings with international databases of coronavirus genomes from around the world, Moyo’s team confirmed that the mutations, found in four samples, had not been seen anywhere else in the world. And there were a lot of them, about 50. “When you see a constellation of mutations you begin to wonder what kind of virus this is and what kind of impact it might have,” he said. On November 23, Moyo’s team deposited their findings into an open international database, available to scientists worldwide.
