That's how the so-called 'deltacron' variant — a mashup of delta and omicron — came to be. This process of recombining tells us a lot about the possible past and future of SARS-CoV-2.
Health officials, including those at the World Health Organization, are watching these hybrid variants closely. Because they demonstrate how the virus can take its most successful parts and combine them quickly into a supervirus. This process is called recombination, and it's how dangerous strains of flu are made.
"From the variant's perspective, it has the best of worlds," Nguyen says.""It's surprising that the virus can really do this, and do it very well, as well.So how does the virus do this? How does it create these Frankenstein hybrids? If both variants manage to infect the same cell, at the same time, then the virus can end up doing recombination, Luo says. In essence, during replication, one variant steals a chunk of genes from another variant. So the delta variant, in way, plagiarized part of omicron's genetic code.