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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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