Slack / Private Message Drop — page 160

[Kristian Andersen] "descended into Twitter-induced madness" - I'm definitely not innocent when it comes to this either and I hate myself a little more after every shitty tweet that I tweet... I sometimes look at my own Twitter feed and roll my eyes :face_with_rolling_eyes:. Taking a break from it wouldn't be a bad idea - I find most of my reading via Twitter, but I also end up spending way way too much time reading these days - making me increasingly grumpy :zany_face:. [2020-09-10 18:59:45] [Eddie Holmes] I agree it's useful for reading, but I value my blood pressure more. [2020-09-11 06:04:25] [Robert Garry] Kristian knows this - I'm too obsessive [maybe a little too compulsive] to handle twitter. I'll read'em, but participating would soon become all-consuming . [2020-09-11 20:31:45] [Eddie Holmes] Is this believable? Best tree scale bar ever. [shared file(s): SSRN-id3680955.pdf] [2020-09-11 20:40:14] [Kristian Andersen] Haha, I never noticed the scale bar - that's awesome! Yes, I think this one is believable - they clearly don't know phylogenetics, but they don't really need to for such a simple analysis. The Chinese paper I reviewed checks out as well. [2020-09-11 20:56:20] [Eddie Holmes] Good, that's what I thought. Superbly crappy tree though. [2020-09-11 20:57:44] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, it's funny - the writing is super funky too so I think they had to get this one out the door quickly. Let's hope this case study isn't representative of what is to come 3-6 months down the line... [2020-09-11 21:01:50] [Eddie Holmes] And the preprint looks like a photocopy. [2020-09-11 22:06:52] [Kristian Andersen] Eddie, great OpEd - something like that was needed! One thing though: "The coronavirus's sluggish pace of mutation is good news for us: A virus that evolved more rapidly would have a greater chance of outrunning any vaccines or drugs developed to counter it." I don't think we can say this for two reasons: (1) there's currently no vaccine induced selection pressure on the viral population, but lord knows what it'll do once there is, and, most importantly, (2) what we _don't_ capture via the evolutionary rate estimates is the rather frequent strange recombination events observed in SARS-CoV-2 - all of those are masked out in alignments and phylogenetic analyses, because it's a different evolutionary process (it's - very interestingly - driven by the proofreading activity of the virus... go figure). Especially the latter point is important when we think about vaccine escape since big and consequential genomic rearrangements can happen really quickly.