TWiEVO 54: Rough drafts of SARS-CoV-2 science

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Nels and Vincent continue their discussion of SARS-CoV-2 from an evolutionary viewpoint, including function of the furin cleavage site, whether Vervet cells are an informative system, another bat isolate, and a nomenclature to assist genomic epidemiology.

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As a working pharmaceutical microbiologist, I could listen to your podcasts forever and get no work done! Thank you so much for putting these out and letting us into your world and minds. These have become priceless to me and a part of my daily routine. I re-listen just to catch all the things I didn't hear the first time around!

swhitehurst

As a layperson with regards to virology I nevertheless find these and associated podcasts like TWIV etc exceptional and reassuring, that there are such knowledgeable and experienced people in such subjects. Fantastic effort everyone, especially Vincent. 👌👍

alocinotasor

Incredible what one can learn from Prof. Racaniello about terminology in this field of science, always impressed.

villebooks

You guys are very cool. Takeaways, 1) "Plaque essays are the engine of virology". 2) Rough Drafts should be strictly off the record for media and 3) tracking clinical signs to specific strains is a brilliant idea.

scottbritton

Very helpful. Many thanks. I'm glad to have this access to thoughtful, educated discussion.

tomsteinberg

Wow, thank you so much for sharing this conversation. It's really fascinating and even inspiring me to learn. I'm auditing your 2020 virology course and really enjoying learning. I think this subject is itself viral.... It's recruiting the machinery of my brain (whatever remains).

briancase

I'm a clinician & I admit I couldn't care less about origin being pangolin vs civet cat vs lab (I'll leave that to the geneticists & politicians). However, we care very much about what appear to be clinical differences in the strains we're seeing where I practice in NYC (thought to be the Europe/ NY strain) vs California (thought to be the Asian strain). We've had visiting physicians here coming from the West Coast & they all say that what they're seeing in NY doesn't look like what they've seen back home. Granted, we're dealing with much higher volume of cases here & these are anecdotal accounts of the differences, but they're consistent across all the visitors. Cali's data seems questionable to me, too, bc I simply don't believe they'd have over 40k cases of NYC covid without more folks on ventilators. Can you review literature on clinical differences of the strains?

scarlet

“Plaque assays prevent literature contamination.”

pawpawforhealth

I am glad that Australia gave them what they needed. It makes me proud to be Australian.

MrOzzyCam

What is the effect of increased temperature, humidity and sunlight on SARS-CoV 2?

saeedalamoudi

Thanks a lot. Is that possible to include references of the paper you are talking about please? Best regards

guillaumebeucher

Sir could you please say something about the low death rates in the Indian subcontinent? Testing is not as extensive as in the US. The countries are incredibly crowded, people are doing only a perfunctory social distancing. In Pakistan people are openly defying the lock down. In Bangladesh thousands of people crowded together for a funeral. But for all that death rates are surprisingly low. It would be very informative if you could do a broadcast on this interesting situation.

hidgik

Since I have no real scientific background (only a little basic pharmaceutical education) I can't truly talk about anything scientific regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, but I think I can tell what I would think about the possibility of the lab escape/release theory.
In my humble opinion, it can't be ruled out completely. There might be good clue or even evidence meanwhile that the virus has been circulating in animal hosts, has been naturally recombined and so on.
Still it could be possible that not all lab work got a protocol. It could be possible the work on samples from field studies went unchecked. That's something I actually can imagine since I'm convinced that humans will do whatever is physically possible (including e.g. making lab generated virus genome mutants that would not be any kind of intelligent approach to willful biological terrorism or what so ever - just because it's possible to make them).
And there is maybe a good amount of distrust out there among the people towards China as a communist country and also as a rival to other global players on the international market, trying to assure its own advantage over other nations.

I'd be actually surprised if every participant would be playing by the rules.
That includes people breaking the laws, people lying and hiding things, people not caring about safety/security measurements and also people doing stupid lab experiments.
(Anyway, I guess of course that isn't limited just to China but is for sure a worldwide phenomenon.)

XxDanielaxX