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Can someone give me an ELI5 on how lab-grown viruses work? (or point me to resources to learn more) Is the process mostly trial and error? Do you just mutate s

by gfd 5y ago

Can someone give me an ELI5 on how lab-grown viruses work? (or point me to resources to learn more) Is the process mostly trial and error? Do you just mutate something a lot then study its properties? If so, are typical labs chock-full of these world ending viruses and one happened to escape, or are the dangerous viruses typically "rare"? How much "engineering" can you do? Do you have levers to control the virality and deadliness? Can you specify it to only target people with specific genes? What's the barrier to entry in terms of knowledge/cost/equipment? Can someone google the covid genome sequence go "print" it out easily? Basically I'm trying to understand the risk of having some depressed grad student unleash covid 2.0 upon the world.

slt2021 5y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x it is called Gain of Function research, when zoonotic viruses (such as bats coronavirus) are grafted with proteins (such as Spike protein and its furin cleavage motif) that make it extremely virulent to humans. Such research on coronaviruses historically has been done at labs in USA and China and considered extremely dangerous (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787) quoting https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china "You can manipulate [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily, it is the spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus zoonotic risk. You can get the sequence, you can build the protein. We worked with Ralph Baric at UNC who did this, insert into a backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So, you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. … The logical progression for vaccines — if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s try to insert some of these [other spike genes] and get a better vaccine [72]"

by gfd 5y ago

slt2021 5y ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x it is called Gain of Function research, when zoonotic viruses (such as bats coronavirus) are grafted with proteins (such as Spike protein and its furin cleavage motif) that make it extremely virulent to humans. Such research on coronaviruses historically has been done at labs in USA and China and considered extremely dangerous (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787) quoting https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china "You can manipulate [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily, it is the spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus zoonotic risk. You can get the sequence, you can build the protein. We worked with Ralph Baric at UNC who did this, insert into a backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So, you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. … The logical progression for vaccines — if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s try to insert some of these [other spike genes] and get a better vaccine [72]"