Omicron is descended from an early, mostly dead branch of SARS-CoV-2

twitter.com

9 points·f38zf5vdt··5 comments

I would also note that the author explicitly does not think it's a spillover event from an introduction to an animal population that later re-entered the human population. The reason being there is a small insertion of complementary RNA from humans that was injected into the virus.

I disagree. The small chunk of the sequence that had been inserted is present in RNA for all primates. It's possible that it was introduced to primates, circulated, and then was re-introduced to humans.

Also possible that it incubated in someone for nearly a year. While reading Omicron news a couple days ago, there was mention of an immune-suppressed individual who was found positive 260 days after initial infection.

I can't find any mention of animal RNA in the twitter thread. Is that mentioned in another thread or deeper in linked documents?

> The presence of host derived RNA insertion from the TMEM245 gene (https://virological.org/t/putative-host-origins-of-rna-inser...) would argue for evolution within human population. Otherwise I would have had this spillback from animal population on the list of hypotheses.

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1464359663282049038

TMEM245 is a conserved chunk of mRNA in primates.

Thanks a lot. Your objection to the statement also makes sense.

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