What happens if P1 and B1 2019-NCov hybridize? | Hacker News Reader

What happens if P1 and B1 2019-NCov hybridize?

2 pointsohgreatwtf4 comments

I can't be the only one thinking that a year on, epidemiologically, this virus has progressed more than expected and is quickly approaching the emergence of a strain that has little or no immunological match with antibodies from previous infections. I worried about that potential in early January 2020 when the pandemic first began and attempted to warn authority figures we may need a strategic plan for more drastic measures, but i imagined we would have at least a few more years.

Mask and PPE suppliers are still in a massive shortage, also, even with extra production lines up and max capacity reached.

What do you think we will do? what do you think will actually happen?

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They can't hybridize.

Animals and plants have multiple chromosomes, and they have two of each one, so you can make an hybrid that mix some chromosomes of one variant with the chromosome of other. [Actually, plants are even more weird.] [And there is crossover, that mix the chromosome of the parents.]

The covirus have only one strand of RNA, so you can't mix it with another strand of another variant From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Genome

> Coronaviruses contain a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA genome. The genome size for coronaviruses ranges from 26.4 to 31.7 kilobases. The genome size is one of the largest among RNA viruses. The genome has a 5′ methylated cap and a 3′ polyadenylated tail.

This is different than the flu virus, that have multiple pieces of RNA (each one is different), so you can mix variants. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Structure,_propertie...

> The central core contains the viral RNA genome and other viral proteins that package and protect this RNA. RNA tends to be single stranded but in special cases it is double. Unusually for a virus, its genome is not a single piece of nucleic acid; instead, it contains seven or eight pieces of segmented negative-sense RNA, each piece of RNA containing either one or two genes, which code for a gene product (protein).

https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/213/1/emerging-viral-mut...

“ Recombination in RNA viruses involves the exchange of genetic information between two nonsegmented RNA genomes, as distinct from the reassortment of RNA seen in viruses containing segmented genomes. ... The second virus family to be shown to undergo RNA recombination is coronavirus (Lai et al. 1985).”

they can and do and you are naive for saying they do not

and didn’t you(where you means virtually everyone) already say a hundred “this can’t happen” before? when are you going to stop saying that something can’t happen and start talking about what to do when it does, or is everyone but me lost in an ego trip

You are right about the possibilities of reconvinations in coronavirus, but I refer this article https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro2614 It's somewhat similar to crossover.

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