Corvid-19 and its impact (name edit)
- Thread starter Saint of M
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Just for pedantry and public information:Kwak said:
1) ACE2 is not a receptor. It's a membrane-associated enzyme (i.e. Angiotensin Converting Enzyme). Enzymes catalyse reactions, receptors are specialised "signal receivers" in chemical communication. Might explain why it's so effective in the lungs, as that's one of the main areas ACE is expressed in the body. Incidentally, ACE inhibitors (e.g. captopril, ramipril, etc.) are the normal first line antihypertensive medications - or at least for white people under ~55 years old.
2) Nature is not smarter than scientists: nature is a literally as dumb as a rock. Evolution finds a way through brute force of randomly generating zillions of changes, where a miniscule proportion will turn out to be useful. The "hit rate" of modern, targetted drug design is many orders of magnitude better than evolution: we might need just 1000-10,000 starter compounds to find one useful. Finally, modelling studies of the sort this article references to determine binding require knowledge of the structure of proteins: determining protein structure can be extremely hard to do, especially with a high degree of accuracy.
Okay so that completely doesn't prove anything. Their argument is this virus looks way too much like the virus found in bats to be one that could have escaped from a human oriented lab. And that, to quote,Kwak said:
"The overall molecular structure of this virus is distinct from the known coronaviruses and instead most closely resembles viruses found in bats and pangolins that had been little studied and never known to cause humans any harm."
And my original post posted a quote itself,
"In 2015 the Wuhan Institute of Virology announced they had successfully taken a Coronavirus strain from horseshoe bats and crossed it with the SARS virus that had been adapted to target human HeLa(human cell line) to create a Coronavirus hybrid that can infect humans."
And they've trusted computer models of data given specifically by the Wuhan Center of Virology to prove it wasn't the Wuhan Center of Virology and their human targeted coronavirus research center that is responsible for a Wuhan based human coronavirus outbreak.
That's not how it works.Silentpony said:
When humans genetically modify organisms to mix and match, they take blocks of genetic code from different sources and mix and match. You could see distinct chunks of genetic material identical to different species added together. In nature, there's a load of random mutation all across the genetic code. Think of it like photoshopping an image: it's easy to stick an element of one picture onto another to make a new one, but even if it's not visible a mile off, a detailed examination by an expert is very likely to spot it.
Now, theoretically, I guess a lab could, say, add in a welter of point mutations at random locations inthe genetic code to attempt to conceal meddling, but this is actually an eye-wateringly vast amount of effort. Those point mutations must all be somewhere where they won't interfere with the proteins that they encode for, which for a start is unlikely to be random. It also means the mutated proteins would have to be identified and tested with trial and error to make sure they aren't adversely impacted, which would take an incredible amount of years, effort and money. It is simply not credible someone would invest that much effort into a bioweapon.
Im not sure it was a bioweapon. There might have been a legitimate reason to create a coronavirus that could infect humans. They really could have been researching how to cure the damn thing if a natural strain ever evolved and infected people.Agema said:
Still doesn't change that it seems WAY to coincidental this virus started in the exact city where research into this virus was being conducted.
as i said earlier I doubt this was a Nemesis breaks quarantine and causes a t-virus outbreak. It easily could have been someone got bit by a bat or lab mouse and contracted it without thinking and just went about their day.
My city is in a soft quarantine. If you're not getting food or walking a dog, they can arrest and fine you.
It's also rather coincidental that the world has been shut down just when people got loudest at saying we have to shut the world down because of climate change problems. It's also coincidental that it'll mostly kill off boomers, who get stereotyped as being a terrible obstacle to progress. And poor people, ditto, in different ways.Silentpony said:
Coincidences happen.
Very often, instances which seem too coincidental actually just have common originating factors. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was studying bat coronaviruses because bat coronaviruses exist in southeast China, and SARS-CoV 2 developed in Wuhan for the same reason.Silentpony said:
So, there's a common factor there in the past (which explains the apparent coincidence), but no actual connection between the research and the outbreak.
(Plus, the 2015 construct has been specifically investigated, and found to be highly divergent from SARS-CoV 2 [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1733440], so it's really unlikely to be the source).
