diemos wrote:REAL Green wrote:The study showed the virus bound more tightly to human-ACE2 than to any of the other animals they tested.
This is going to be true for any human pandemic virus. Regardless of whether it evolved naturally or not.
And when one of our endemic corona viruses mutates and jumps to pigs they're going to find that it binds more tightly to pig-ACE2 receptors. Because that's what has to happen for it to jump the species barrier and become pandemic.
Whoa there. You didn't understand the science in the report that REAL Green linked to.
Some corona viruses can affect several different species at once....this is how they jump from species to species. For instance a Bat corona virus might also be capable of infecting a pangolin and a cat and a human, lets say.
But if the corona virus was resident for a long time in the bat population, then evolution will tend to make the virus most efficient at infecting bats. Yes, other species might be able to get it, but it is resident in bats then it should evolve in such a way that it most efficiently infects bats, since thats what it is doing. The ability to infect other species only occurs because other species have some cells that are somewhat similar to bats.
This new study shows that the Wuhan virus is most efficient at infecting HUMANS. No virus would evolve that way if it was resident in a population of bats. It might JUMP to humans, but it would still be the same virus that was resident in bats and evolved to infect bats.
The new study shows that this virus is best adapted to infect humans. That suggests that (1) perhaps it was resident somewhere in a population of humans for a very long time and evolved there so that it most efficiently infects humans. But no such population of infected humans off somewhere with the virus seems to exist. The virus appears for the first time in Wuhan and its ALREADY evolved to best infect humans.
So that means (2) it must have already been modified in some way to make it very efficient at infecting humans when it first appears in Wuhan infecting humans.
The scientific paper suggests that this could be done in human cell cultures in a lab, i.e. if a lab-------say a lab in Wuhan-----was cultivating Corornavirus in human cell cultures to see how the virus infected humans, then the virus might be modified or perhaps was even allowed to evolve in the cell cultures to become very efficient at infecting humans.
This is a very important scientific discovery..
Its the first strong scientific evidence that this virus is highly evolved specifically to infect humans-----not bats or pangolins or cats or anything else. That suggests this virus may be have cultivated in human cell cultures in a lab and evolved as part of that study to be highly efficient at infecting humans. AND, although this study doesn't reach any firm conclusions as to what lab that was, we know the Wuhan lab both collected bat coronaviruses from all over China and brought them back to the Wuhan lab and was engaged in research on those virus, including attempts to genetically modify those viruses, as the Wuhan lab published a research paper about doing this a couple of years ago.
I know its a scary thought that Chinese scientists might have made a boo-boo in their research on the bat viruses leading to the novel coronavirus global disease pandemic we are in now, but trust me----scientists make boo-boos all the time. Usually not this disastrous, but I can imagine this happening very easily. Cheers!