3 ms·
> It also opens the door to a “nightmare scenario”: That the two viruses will meet in a single person, swap their mutations, and create an even more dangerous s
by dlazar 6y ago
> It also opens the door to a “nightmare scenario”: That the two viruses will meet in a single person, swap their mutations, and create an even more dangerous strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
How would that even work? This is an RNA virus: is there a meiosis-like mechanism for two different RNA viruses infecting the same cell to exchange genes?
- MagnumOpus 6y agoYes there is, see [1] for details. Either by reassortment or copy choice recombination if both virus variants infect the same cell. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3324781/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3324781/