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Comment by 0xebfc | Hacker News Reader

If you want detailed virological and epidemiological research and discussion, please see: http://virological.org/

There are other virology / epidemiology forums which may be of use, but I don't have these links at-hand.

For instance, the following link is a highly descriptive, accessible analysis of nCoV-2019: http://virological.org/t/analysis-of-wuhan-coronavirus-deja-...

OPs article does have merit, as far as giving a first-person account of treating the virus and quarantine procedures, but you'll learn a lot more about the virus itself if you follow the research.

View on HN

Ok and what does this mean?

“ nCoV2019 has a furin-sensitive motif at the traditional S1/S2 border fo the spike protein, i.e. RRAR, that was lacking in SARS (which depends on cathepsin cleavage a few amino acids downstream). nCoV2019 lacks the secondary minimal furin cleavage site, i.e. RNTR, that is found in SARS. Therefore, the endoproteolytic cleavage pattern is expected to be different between nCoV2019 and SARS.

Prediction of O-glycosylation sites reveals a cluster of Serine residues, just before and after the RRAR cleavage site, with a high propensity to form a “mini-mucin” patch at that site. It is positioned to protect the putative fusion peptide region in the native or pre-fusion Swiss-Model projection of the probable nCoV2019 structure.”

Not sure how to ‘follow the research’ when the first page has 12 proper nouns/terms I’ve never encountered...

Furin --> A protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furin

Spike protein --> the proteins on the surface of a virus used to attach onto or enter a host cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peplomer

RRAR --> This is a group of amino acids: Arginine Arginine Alanine Arginine. Here is the list of abbreviations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/MLACourse/Modules/MolBioR...

For a discussion of cleavage --> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/endoproteolytic

For a discussion of it relevant to another virus --> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC103966/

Mucin --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucin

O-Glycosylation --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-linked_glycosylation

So this is a discussion of the differences in how these viruses uses their respective spike proteins to trigger endoproteolytic cleavage in the host cell. Specifically, what the impact of different positionings of their amino acids is.

For example, the idea "Furin-sensitive motif" means that there is a section of the spike protein which contains the amino acids described (RRAR), which is sensitive to the protein Furin in host cells.

See here as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6756975_Proteolysis...

You made two nice points:

1) In complex problems outside your domain, trust the experts.

2) These experts should go out and sell the truth in way laypeople understand them. Which is incredibly hard as everyone prefers dooms day scenarios it seems.

Just kind of sad even HN doesn't get that as this thread clearly shows.

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