On Jul. 2, 2020, scientists from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory and La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) announced that two variants of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) were circulating in mid-March.

The variants, called G614 and D614, had just a small difference in their ‘spike’ protein – the viral machinery that coronaviruses use to enter host cells. The study was published in Cell.