The monkeypox virus is mutating. Are scientists worried?

Nature – In some samples, large chunks of the virus’s genome have disappeared — but understanding whether the mutations affect its behaviour will be difficult. As researchers at the Minnesota Department of Health in St. Paul were sequencing samples of the monkeypox virus a few months ago, they made a surprising discovery. In one sample collected from an infected person, a large chunk of the virus’s genome was missing, and another chunk had moved to an entirely different spot in the sequence. Crystal Gigante, a microbiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, was called in to help examine the mutations. She and her colleagues found similar deletions and rearrangements in a handful of other monkeypox genomes collected in the United States, according to a report that they posted on 17 September on the preprint server bioRxiv that has not undergone peer-review¹.