Slack / Private Message Drop — page 566

[Kristian Andersen] OK article from Betsy - and great quote from you Bob! [2021-03-04 11:34:03] [Eddie Holmes] The Bob's Bollocks! [2021-03-04 11:37:36] [Robert Garry] Oh yes - but perhaps a bit of a missed opportunity for more Bullocks on FoxBusiness....Might have been fun but .... [2021-03-04 12:17:06] [Eddie Holmes] @Kristian Andersen There's a recombination paper in the bioRxiv queue that would be good if you took a look at. Looks like garbage to me. [2021-03-04 12:35:47] [Andrew Rambaut] I found some solid examples of recombination with B.1.1.7. No surprises but pretty clear with multiple genomes sequenced in different labs. [2021-03-04 12:39:50] [Eddie Holmes] This one does not look very good and talks about enhanced fitness. But I don't have time to look at it now as I have to do another talk. [2021-03-04 12:55:37] [Kristian Andersen] I see it Eddie - will take a look. We have a few very recent genomes that smell like recombination to me as well - I'm pretty convinced recombination happens quite frequently, so (as discussed before), I'm not surprised. That said, need proper evidence. [2021-03-04 12:59:01] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, junk. "The VOCs have a lot of mutations so they must be recombinants".... [2021-03-04 13:25:17] [Kristian Andersen] *Key* paper from South Africa here - people infected with B.1.351 fully neutralize B.1.351 viruses AND neutralize non-B.1.351 viruses pretty well. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.21250224v2 [2021-03-04 13:27:35] [Kristian Andersen] Also, one very interesting finding - although it's n=1. They had somebody infected by non-B.1.351 _but_ with a virus that had the E484K mutation. The serum from that patient absolutely knocked it out of the park when it came to neut tiers against both B.1.351 and non-B.1.351 - so much so, they had to exclude the individual from most analyses. If this holds up, we might have a winner for near-perfect vaccine antigen - spike + E484K, 2P, and dFCS. That'd be cool. [2021-03-04 14:19:33] [Eddie Holmes] I finally looked at this carefully. Did you see the BEAST analysis? TempEST found no temporal structure so they went ahead and used a strick clock anyway. On a 440 nt region. [shared file(s): Latrinne.NatComm20.pdf]