This Week in Virology
Virology journal club; papers and experiments checkable
Phage bet-hedging via 10,000x reversion, and the first humanized EBV antibodies
Phages use the 10,000-fold reversion rate of SSRs to hedge their bets, humanized EBV antibodies stop tumors in vivo, and vaccine work advances on several fronts.
1:52:01Phages use replication slippage to stock variants, betting bacterial defenses will escalate
Slippage is not a replication fault but a phage hedge: in any population a minority of individuals shift reading frame at repeat sequences, generating variants that selection has not picked yet. Most of the population fits the current environment; the moment bacterial defenses escalate, the low-frequency backups take over.
48:56A parasite has given tens of thousands of Americans diarrhea: it won't wash off, won't grow in culture, and won't show whether it's alive
The oocysts behind tens of thousands of US cases resist bleach and rinsing, and only turn infectious one to two weeks after they are shed; the lab can neither culture them nor test whether they are alive, which is why these outbreaks are so hard to cut off.
Ebola infects neurons and keeps shedding virus for 120 days; a fish cancer spreads between fish
Brain organoids show that Ebola can infect neurons and keep releasing infectious virus for 120 days; melanomas in a brown bullhead population descend from a single clonal ancestor and spread from fish to fish. The boundaries of viral persistence and of transmissible cancer get rewritten at the same time.
Giving Tamiflu too late in critical flu doubles the risk of death
Critically ill flu patients who start Tamiflu only about five days into symptoms face roughly double the 90-day risk of death compared with no antiviral; an mRNA flu vaccine is approved, but only 50-64-year-olds got traditional approval.
Anti-vaccine sentiment is not new: Jenner's own book is full of people cursing him
This episode shows the anti-vaccine movement is as old as vaccines themselves; phage SPO1 uses liquid-liquid phase-separated condensates to switch transcriptional phases; ancient smallpox DNA from South America confirms transmission by European colonization; and declining reading plus AI-generated content threaten our powers of discernment.
The Order Calls Vaccines Soda and Splits MMR Into More Shots: Every Sentence Is a Lie
Every sentence in the ‘gold standard’ executive order gets called a lie: splitting MMR to add needles, vaccines as bottled soda, Merck refusing outright — and the new CDC director will have to pick a side.