The pandemic generated by SARS‐Cov‐2 has caused a large number of cases and deaths in the world, but South America has been one of the continents that were most hard hit. The appearance of new variants causes concern because of the possibility that they may evade the protection generated by vaccination campaigns, their greater capacity to be transmitted, or their higher virulence. We analyzed the circulating variants in Peru after improving our Genomic Surveillance program. The results indicate a steep increase of the lambda lineage (C.37) until becoming predominant between January and April 2021, despite the cocirculation of other variants of concern or interest. Lambda lineage deserves close monitoring and could probably become a variant of concern in the near future.

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Introduction COVID-19 infection is a major public health problem in the world and reinfections are becoming more frequent. Our main objective was to describe the epidemiological, clinical and genomic characteristics of the confirmed cases of reinfection by SARS-CoV-2 in the capital of Lima and Callao, Peru. Methods We searched in the Peruvian laboratory information system from April 2020 up to May, 2021, looking for cases having 2 positive molecular tests for SARS-CoV-2 with more than 90 days between them. We performed genomic sequencing to the available pairs of samples and described the clinical characteristics, epidemiological and genomic of the confirmed reinfections. Results There were 1,694,164 people with a positive diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 in Lima/Callao during the study period. Of these, 1,695 had 2 positive molecular tests with more than 90 days between them. 211 had both samples available for genomic analysis according to our selection criteria, these were retrieved and submitted to sequencing. 30 were confirmed to be SARS-CoV-2 reinfections having 2 different lineages in the 2 episodes. The variant Lambda (C.37) was the most common during the second infection, accounting for 19 (63.3%) of these. Conclusions We report 30 cases of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 reinfections. The Lambda variant was the most common cause of the second infections, in concordance with its predominant circulation during Peru´s second wave. This report describes the largest series of confirmed reinfections by SARS-CoV-2.

The current methods for inferring antigenic, pathogenic or virulence factors in bacteria include in-silico or computational tools. Bartonella bacilliformis, the causal agent of Carrion's disease (CD) is a Gram-negative microorganism transmitted by the sand fly Lutzomya verrucarum mainly in Peruvian Inter-Andean valleys. A better understanding of the pathogenicity of B. bacilliformis, the implementation of serological diagnostic methods and the development of candidate vaccines for the control of CD could be facilitated by the identification of outer membrane exposed proteins such as outer-membrane beta-barrels (OMBB) and outer-membrane lipoproteins (OMLPP). In this study we present the in-silico identification of OMBBs and OMLPPs in B. bacilliformis. The present analysis identified 32 OMBBs and 9 OMLPPs, of which 15 and 4 are reported for the first time as potential antigenic, pathogenic and virulence-related proteins, respectively. Future implications of this study are discussed and compared with proteins validated by experimental assays.