1/ Today has brought a lot of news about 'variants', as we discover community transmission of B.1.351 (SA variant) in the UK.

But some of the people who study these genomes have increasingly started focusing on a different concept: 'constellations', which may be more useful.

2/ We're actually all using 'variant' wrong anyway – we're using it to refer to a 'lineage'. A lineage is a set of viruses descended from a common ancestor. All B.1.1.7 (UK variant) viruses descend from an infection that probably occurred in August or September.
3/ But what makes this lineage practically important is that it carries a set of mutations which make it more transmissible.

I.e. we don't really care about the ancestry in itself.
4/ For example, one of the mutations that we think is important to B.1.1.7's faster transmission is called N501Y.
5/ It turns out that a lot of the lineages identified as important recently, in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK, have mutations such as N501Y in common (figure adapted from https://t.co/lpJeW0GGnU)
6/ You can see in the table that the lineage originating in South Africa, and those originating in Brazil, have another mutation, called E484K, in common.
7/ Today PHE's Technical Briefing 5 reveals that a small number of B.1.1.7 (UK lineage) genomes have recently been found which newly carry the E484K mutation, which had previously been seen in these South African and Brazilian lineages.
8/ This shows why thinking about constellations is useful. A 'constellation' is just a set of shared mutations carried by viruses, irrespective of ancestry.
9/ Should we treat B.1.1.7+E484K cases as less concerning than viruses descending from those that originated in South Africa?
10/ We don't know the answer to that one way or another. We don't know to what extent E484K is the key mutation to driving the properties of a lineage, and we don't know how this mutation might interact with other mutations B.1.1.7 carries.
11/ But increasingly, it's going to be important to focus on the mutations that viruses carry, and understanding what effect these have, rather than simply focusing on their ancestry.
12/ From everything we have seen across the continents, E484K seems significant, and we should be very alert to its emergence in another lineage with high transmissibility. (There's every indication that the public health authorities are alert).
13/ Here's some more on constellations: https://t.co/dOzmEG5Vju
(I regret saying the use of 'variant' was 'wrong' above, it's all very fuzzy!)

More from Society

Tomorrow, January 6th, MAGA chuds, Proud Boys, and white supremacists are planned to descend on Washington D.C. to contest the election. Among them will be NSC-131, a New England based neo-Nazi organization. Let's welcome them by saying hi to one of their members, Eddie Stuart!


Edward Stuart, from Chester, New Hampshire, has been a member of Nationalist Social Club (NSC) since the very beginning and is a staple participant in their actions. He is known in NSC chats as "Carl Jung" and is well connected in the New England Nazi scene.
2/


NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group that was started in Massachusetts in early 2020 by Chris Hood. You can learn more about NSC and it's members in these threads:


Eddie describes his ideology as "Esoteric Hitlerism" which is an occult form of Nazism that literally worships Adolf Hitler as a god, or, specifically, as an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu. Here is Ed holding the RigVeda with some of his occult Nazi pals. Interesting Ed!
4/


Much of this ideological insight was gained from Eddie's Twitter, where he originally used his "Carl Jung" persona and reposts explicit neo-fascist content and racist memes. In one edited picture, Eddie can be seen at an NSC event in late June 2020 holding a Nazi Sonnenrad flag
5

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https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.

https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.


Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.