Re:Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant
by codeulike on Thursday December 09, 2021 @05:44PM
(#29504072)
Good question. My vague understanding is that antibodies react to the external shape of the virus, the spike and so on. Whereas T-cells react to the little chunks of rna produced during multiplication of the virus, kindof the byprodyucts of a virus-factory-cell, and as such are not restricted to the 'outside' of the virus but can potentially learn about any part of the virus' genome. Hence T-cells are less likely to be thrown off by spike mutations. But my grasp on this is very vague.
Why do you think that?
A genome codes for protein production. T-cells are something like a Unix grep for protein sequences (instead of character regexes) with their grep argument a memorized protein sequence to recognize in the wild.
So it's some sort of dumb luck if the entirety of proteins, specified in a genome's blueprints, would happen to have t-cells assigned to recognize all of them.