Thanks to everyone that participated in the nomination thread, and thanks to u/Graphenium and u/clemaneuverers for the suggestion!
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Given your expertise, you might actually be able to answer a question that’s been pressing lately:
Are you caught up on the issue of “isolating” SARS CoV2? Especially the conspiracy angle, which is that only blended mixtures of genes have been recovered which get sequenced VIA a schematic of SARS CoV1? That’s covered in depth in the video near the mid point, basically what they’re doing could be done on any genetic sample, because they’re just re-ordering tiny segments into to match the overall pattern (like those portraits made of hundreds of smaller portraits selected by a computer to conform to the programmed color gradient instructions). Basically I’d appreciate your take on the question of “have we isolated this virus?” And the associated concerns.
I really think you should watch the whole thing, the first 10 minutes are like the abstract or the overview, where the video tells you in advance the (shocking, for sure) conclusions that will end up being drawn, but with none of the evidence yet. The topics of 1917 influenza research (and their inability to observe human to human transmission no matter how hard they tried) and also “terrain theory” as it has come to be known, which gets talked about in detail during the end of the doc are particularly interesting to me, but honestly I found myself going from more to less apprehension about the ideas as they were able to show the evidence behind the claims made at the start. Regardless, thanks
So for your question about isolating the virus, the simple answer is we have the tools to do it, but either through incompetence or dastardliness (is that a word?), I doubt that we have. I also think its inconsequential at this point, bc the govt has thrown out every standard of traditional virology, immunology, and epidemiology. You don't even need to believe a conspiracy to be outraged at the sheer lack of actual science.
When you're constructing a sequence de novo, the bioinformatic algorithms are different than those where you're comparing a sequence to something already sequenced in the database. (Used to work for a genomics company too lol)... I'll see if I can dig up some papers that may help explain the process better for you and give you an idea of what really goes into it.
I'll try to flip through the vid to the flu and terrain, bc I'm curious what he has to say about that. But I stopped at 10 minutes bc he doesn't even know where in the cell a protein is made, I can't really take him seriously. And that's just basic cell bio, not even all the other outlandish and unsourced claims he made.
I noticed some of this too. I haven't watched much yet. Let's do some study and find a better comprehensive video.
Greetings, no link or "comprehensive video" but you seem to miss denovo, ie. "from scratch" sequencing as it occured with covid and many others. To reuse your analogy, my understanding of an Alumina mechanical sequencer is that rather than build the portrait made of hundreds of smaller portraits based on an algorithm, imagine the image, actually a bunch of this original image, already existed but has been snipped in to bits of a random size a little bigger than the "small portraits". By doing lots of sequencing, or what would be grabbing the cut up bits and reading the pixels that make them up, even with errors, you can sort of put the original image back together based on the mathematical process of overlap. Some bits will contain overlapping segments because the bits don't come from just ONE image of the full portrait, but from a bunch of those portraits all cut up in to random bits. Its the overlap which allows a machine to read in and then analyze the most likely original, even considering an error rate in reading in the chopped-bits. This also means you can have other sequences of some stuff mixed in and still sort it out, at least that is my understanding of the basic mathematics. This also means you don't have to fully "isolate" since all you have to have is bits of DNA of sufficient length, read them in quick without too many errors, and rest can be done in software using math.