The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate (2015)

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by fastaguy88 on Sunday August 09, 2020 @10:56PM (#24105024)

This is a spectacularly misleading paper in a non-biological journal that assumes, without any explanation, that somehow scientists thawed out a 1950 H1N1 strain and somehow, through some gain of function process, made the 1977 version.

The obvious question is, How?

In 1977 (or 1976, to produce something that would have infected people in 1977), recombinant DNA technology was new; cloning had just begun. There were very few restriction enzymes, oligonucleotide synthesis was done by hand (literally) and PCR had not been invented yet. Today, GOF studies are easy because we can synthesize virtually any piece of DNA. But in 1977, graduate students got rich because they could synthesize a dozen-ish residues of DNA and sell them (for stock) to Genentech.

What people were not doing was engineering new forms of flu virus.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by medymed on Sunday August 09, 2020 @11:45PM (#24105298)

I don’t think you parsed the paper quite accurately. It was just the same virus as the 50s. There was no gain of function. The mention of gain of function regards debated policy issues in 2015 when the paper was published.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by fastaguy88 on Monday August 10, 2020 @12:29PM (#24111032)

The paper says that the 1977 H1N1 is not identical to the 1950's strains, but very similar, and that a tree build from sequences suggests the 1977 strain is most closely related to the 1950's strains. So there are differences, and the question is, are they natural or synthetic. I do not think the technology was available to make synthetic changes.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by burfog on Sunday August 09, 2020 @11:48PM (#24105314)

No fancy technology is required. Long before that, we created the dog and the apple. The USSR even recreated the wolf-to-dog transition with foxes. Doing something similar with viruses is much easier because the generations are shorter and because exposure to UV is easy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by fastaguy88 on Monday August 10, 2020 @12:32PM (#24111057)

Yes, we know how to breed animals and plants. But do we know how to breed flu viruses? Animals and plants are outbred, and provide great genetic diversity for selecting desired traits. But these viruses were virtually identical (no diversity), and it is completely unclear how one would "select" for a virus with the desired properties.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by burfog on Monday August 10, 2020 @02:29PM (#24112428)

We created the live polio vaccine by breeding. That was long before fancy genetic technology.

Flu viruses are particularly easy to breed. Viruses have short generation times and easy vulnerability to genetic damage. Flu viruses even have a genome that isn't in one chunk, sort of like having chromosomes, making them extra easy to breed.

Selection is a simple matter of having it reproduce quickly in the desired cells.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by fastaguy88 on Monday August 10, 2020 @07:25PM (#24115397)

All this is true, but does not explain how to breed a flu virus with the appropriate disease causing attributes while keeping it virtually (>97%) identical.

[ Parent | on HN ]