A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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One thing from the preprint I agree about though - and mentioned when I testified in front of the Danish parlamentyesterday "The rapid acquisition and spread of SARS-CoV-2 mutations in minks suggests that if a similarphenomenon of host adaptation had occurred upon its jump into humans, those human-specific mutations would likely have reached fixation already before the first SARS-CoV-2 genomes were generated". That could very likelybe true - ultra fast fixation during the first few rounds of human to human transmission.
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Yes. I have been saying that for years. Clear in avian flu too (the same mutations come up). Adaptations to the within-host environment are very rapid. Adaptations to transmission will be much slower. Thus viruses that jump and spread are likely already able to spread but may need some tweaking for within-host growth.
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The other thing that virologists struggle with is that better receptor binding does not equal fitter viruses.
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But even with the mink, there are lots of lineages in Marion's trees that don't have Y453F.
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2020-11-17 09:13
Kristian G. Andersen
Yup, I have been hearing you saying this for years - for Ebola too. For SARS we actually got to see some of those mutations because we captured the intermediate host - would be very interesting to see for SARS2 as well, but the mink data is definitely interesting in this regard.
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Yeah, I'm not quite sure what Y453F is about - might just be marginally beneficial.
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It appears sufficient times in mink to mean it must be selected for but possibly quite weakly. And possibly as a resultof the high density.
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Yup - plausibly this one becomes fixed when big populations get hit. A lot of diversity in the size of the various farms- especially in Denmark (not sure about NL - but I think they have more 'mega' farms).
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Here is a report I wrote for the WHO. To me the most interesting thing is the spike deletion at 69/70 that appears after Y453F and also appears after N469K in humans [shared file(s): Mink-associated_mutations_in_humans.pdf]