Omicron variant may come from mice, China study says

The study — published in the Journal of Genetics and Genomics and can be read on the pre-pint server bioRxiv — looked into why the omicron variant is so different compared to other COVID-19 variants. A team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing found that the omicron variant "closely resembled the mutations associated with virus evolution in mouse cells," according to IFL Science. "Furthermore, they say that the mutations show that the virus has adapted to infecting mouse cells," IFL Science reports. The scientists suggest that the omicron variant may have jumped from mice to humans…