Coronavirus Open Thread 2023

[Andrew]

@finley

@slawa

“To our knowledge, this is the first documented example of a SARS-CoV-2 variant increasing its fitness through recombination rather than substitutions carried out in a lab.”

Fixed that for them

Just skimmed the article, but I think they’re saying that all previous variants (including natural ones as well as any lab-derived original ones) arose through base/amino acid substitutions, and this is the first one known to occur because of recombination between two different variants.

I guess it’s more of academic interest than anything else though.

[finley]

I gathered that (although presumably recombinant variants could have been created in a lab). I was just mocking the (implied) idea that substitutions of patented codon sequences arose by natural selection