Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

There's the whole t-cell and b-cell stuff that protects from serious disease but it's much harder to test/measure so you don't get these rapid headline grabbing lab studies. T-cells as I understand it are much less likely to be thrown off by spike mutations because they react to whole genome of virus (edit: T-cells from an infection that is).

View on HN

This is not my area but isn't the point of the mRNA vaccines that that virus' DNA is never introduced into your body? You only end up with a narrow transcribed slice of that DNA targeting a specific protein.

I've also never heard of your immune system targetting a genome; how is it generally gaining access to that genome when it is encapsulated?

My understanding of the spike targeting is that COVID is only so infectious because of the specific configuration of that spike protein. Change it too much, and it stops being nearly as infectious (and thus stops being COVID as we know it).

oh yeah thats a point, t-cells will only be able to react to the things that they've seen

> because they react to whole genome of virus

Why do you think that?

A genome codes for protein production. T-cells are something like a Unix grep for protein sequences (instead of character regexes) with their grep argument a memorized protein sequence to recognize in the wild.

So it's some sort of dumb luck if the entirety of proteins, specified in a genome's blueprints, would happen to have t-cells assigned to recognize all of them.

Good question. My vague understanding is that antibodies react to the external shape of the virus, the spike and so on. Whereas T-cells react to the little chunks of rna produced during multiplication of the virus, kindof the byprodyucts of a virus-factory-cell, and as such are not restricted to the 'outside' of the virus but can potentially learn about any part of the virus' genome. Hence T-cells are less likely to be thrown off by spike mutations. But my grasp on this is very vague.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com