Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19
by leetcrew on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:22PM
(#22695156)
isn't 4% difference in DNA pretty significant? that's comparable to the genetic difference between a human and a mouse, iirc.
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Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19
by zip6 on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:27PM
(#22695224)
Human and chimp DNA is 96% the same according to [0]. I'm not a biologist so I have no idea if this logic is applicable to viruses.
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/8/chimps-humans...
Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19
by vikramkr on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:55PM
(#22695486)
Quantifying differences is really difficult and the commonly cited numbers are kinda iffy as a rigorous measurement (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-does-being-99...) in the sense that the public interprets them - 99% comes from looking at single base pair changes only. For the coronavirus, it's an RNA virus so it'll mutate a lot faster than DNA viruses or organisms like us. And the generation time is gong to be a lot faster to allow for a lot more divergence more quickly than longer generation times in mammals.
Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19
by romski on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:28PM
(#22695237)
It’s not DNA, it’s an RNA virus. More changes happen with them.
Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19
by cjf101 on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:57PM
(#22695522)
There's also a lot less genetic information in a typical virus than in a human, so each mutation represents a much larger percentage change.
For context: The entire SARS-COV-2 genome is 29,811 nucleotides long. The human genome is around 3 billion base pairs.