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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

Can someone with a good understanding of virology and a passable understanding of code explain to me how mRNA vaccines are not a regex, and don't have the hazards of a regex?

What I mean is if the mRNA vaccine causes antigens that respond to a partial match of c-19 dna segments, which is how it is effective against even yet-to-be-developed spike proteins, isn't it necessarily associated with the hazards of fuzzy matching we have with regexes?

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I'm trying to even understand the question. Assuming you mean "regex" in the programming sense, then the two questions are of completely different domains, and assumming you can say anything about the "hazards" of one given your knowledge of the other sounds like the physicist who assumes that all problems can just be boiled down to some other problem he has a solution to.[1]

The vaccine is in no way shape or form a "regex."

1. https://xkcd.com/793/

The antigens don't match on DNA segments. They match on proteins that the virus has on it. The mRNA sequence is specific to produce that very particular pattern. Not a wildcard.

To be extra clear, antigens match on the physical shape of the proteins resulting from the mRNA programming.

They have no way to access the underlying DNA.

And proteins have two major parts; the sequence of amino acids that they’re composed of, and how they’re folded. This folding detail is no small thing, as proteins don’t do the right thing when they’re folded wrong.

And then there's a fourth stage, where different proteins come together to from a complex.

The BioNtech-Vaccine accounts for this afaik, to prevent the spike-proteins from clumping.

Actually, my understanding [1] is that the spike proteins are expected to come together to form a full spike, and that this is what the antibodies match off of.

So, even further from regex. The RNA gets turned into a sequence of amino acids, which folds in an extremely complex 3D shape, which bind together with two other proteins to form a large structure, the full shape of which is matched by antibodies.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/pfizer-biont...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

I mean if you wanted you could ask my question as

"If the mRNA vaccine causes the creation of antibodies which respond to a variety of spike proteins, how can we build confidence around the set of proteins which trigger and don't trigger an immune response, when the set of potential protein configurations is infinite"

I am not trying to mis-represent the problem by using a regex as an example, but trying to describe the "infinite set" aspect of the problem in a way that is understood by 90%+ of the people here.

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