Higher antibodies in Gujaratis after second wave: GBRC research

The second wave of Covid-19 was perhaps the most lethal for most of India. Gujarat too recorded a dramatic rise in case, the peak being 14,605 cases on April 30, at the rate of 10 cases every minute. The fall has been equally sharp at 2,230 cases on May 30, a seven-fold decline.

This phenomenon took place because of mutation in the Delta variant which led to a much faster immune response in hosts triggering a rapid generation of antibodies thereby paving the way for `herd immunity’ against the virus, Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre says.

“Due to two missing amino acids on ORF8 protein in the Delta variant, it cannot hold MHC-1 – the cell surface molecules that alert the immune system in humans – tightly. We hypothesize that the weaker binding resulted in early alert to the immune system that got triggered after Covid, however milder,” said a researcher.


The researchers from GBRC claimed that Delta variant’s design is what may have caused a higher antibody level even when the person was mildly infected. This was included in a paper titled ‘Defective ORF8 dimerization in Delta variant of SARS CoV2 1 leads to abrogation of ORF8 MHC-I interaction and overcome suppression of adaptive immune response’, by the GBRC.