How Coronavirus Mutations Arise and New Variants Emerge

This piece was produced in cooperation with the Nib.

Maki Naro is an award-winning feral cartoonist and science communicator. You can reliably find him online, where he tweets from the handle @sciencecomic

Diana Kwon is a freelance science journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She primarily covers the life sciences and health, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, The Scientist, Nature, Knowable Magazine and many other publications.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.