Science
Related: About this forumProfile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic.
The following news item from the scientific journal Nature is open sourced and written for general consumption:
Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic
Scientists are piecing together how SARS-CoV-2 operates, where it came from and what it might do next but pressing questions remain about the source of COVID-19.
(David Cyranoski, Nature 581, 22-26 (2020))
Some brief excerpts:
The link between these pathogens remained hidden until the 1960s, when researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States isolated two viruses with crown-like structures causing common colds in humans. Scientists soon noticed that the viruses identified in sick animals had the same bristly structure, studded with spiky protein protrusions. Under electron microscopes, these viruses resembled the solar corona, which led researchers in 1968 to coin the term coronaviruses for the entire group.
It was a family of dynamic killers: dog coronaviruses could harm cats, the cat coronavirus could ravage pig intestines. Researchers thought that coronaviruses caused only mild symptoms in humans, until the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 revealed how easily these versatile viruses could kill people...
...Bad family.
Of the viruses that attack humans, coronaviruses are big. At 125 nanometres in diameter, they are also relatively large for the viruses that use RNA to replicate, the group that accounts for most newly emerging diseases. But coronaviruses really stand out for their genomes. With 30,000 genetic bases, coronaviruses have the largest genomes of all RNA viruses. Their genomes are more than three times as big as those of HIV and hepatitis C, and more than twice influenzas.
Coronaviruses are also one of the few RNA viruses with a genomic proofreading mechanism which keeps the virus from accumulating mutations that could weaken it. That ability might be why common antivirals such as ribavirin, which can thwart viruses such as hepatitis C, have failed to subdue SARS-CoV-2...
When two bad families, the Trump family and the Corona Virus family interact, there's hell to pay.
It's worth a read; it's short and not overly technical.
riversedge
(70,350 posts)FM123
(10,054 posts)Interesting: But coronaviruses have a special trick that gives them a deadly dynamism: they frequently recombine, swapping chunks of their RNA with other coronaviruses.
Mike 03
(16,616 posts)This paragraph:
Does this mean COVID-19 could possibly be a bloodborne virus (in addition to being a respiratory virus)? Most of what I've read recently says it is not, so maybe this blood-travel happens in rare instances. The question sometimes arises when people are asking about donating blood.
NNadir
(33,574 posts)...not only from the text here, but also from the fact that the lung infections are very severe and lung tissue is rich with capillary veins.
I would imagine it could pass through some lesions, and I believe I've heard of people coughing up blood.
Las Vegas Mixx
(299 posts)lastlib
(23,323 posts)"The Andromeda Strain" has arrived--or so it seems!