4 ms·
> deletion mutants have to be found in the wild I have no background in this whatsoever, so feel free to ignore my comment, but my guess is that finding them i
by zamfi 7y ago
> deletion mutants have to be found in the wild
I have no background in this whatsoever, so feel free to ignore my comment, but my guess is that finding them in the wild along with a large-enough (and representative-enough) infected population without severe symptoms basically saves the work of trying 5k different possible variant in animals — just skip the the promising candidate directly, no?
- pazimzadeh 7y agoI like the idea of pairing clinical data with virus sequence information from infected patients. That seems like medicine of the future. However, the PCR-based diagnostic tests that are current being used rely on amplifying only a small part of the virus genome so we are actually blind to how the rest of the virus is changing in the larger population (at least in routine diagnostic tests).
- danieltillett 7y agoThat is right. We don’t know what mutations might make the virus attenuated (mild), but we can use what Nature has done to tell us. We also get human data on safety thrown in for free. This makes a huge difference in how quickly we can use a new strain in people even under controlled conditions.