Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs - 2

Coming To A GenBank Near You

In the first post of this series I bemoaned the way that RNA genomes were sequenced.

My specific beef was that 'U' for uracil was not used by current genome database building techniques, instead 'T' was used as it is in DNA sequencing (Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs, at Section II).  

I am more at ease now, since new techniques have been developed to solve the problem (MasterOfPores: A Workflow for the Analysis of Oxford Nanopore Direct RNA Sequencing Datasets).

There are some significant problems in the science of RNA nucleotide analysis (e.g. "the cause for the prolonged and recurrent production of viral RNA remains unknown", It's In The GenBank - 2) which is a critical exercise in civilization's practices that seek to avoid pandemics.

It's a process

The following three links evince a recent back and forth between two research teams concerning what causes "chimeric" (mixed) genome readings and illustrates some of the weaknesses in current virology research (Reverse-transcribed SARS-CoV-2 RNA can integrate into the genome of cultured human cells and can be expressed in patient-derived tissues; No evidence of SARS-CoV-2 reverse transcription and integration as the origin of chimeric transcripts in patient tissues, Response to Parry et al.: Strong evidence for genomic integration of SARS-CoV-2 sequences and expression in patient tissues).

In closing, let me remind readers that Dredd Blog has posted about these issues for many a year.

Dredd Blog hypothesizes that "the mass-slaughter-of-animals-for-food industry" and Big Pharma's promiscuous destruction of microbes, by indiscriminate killing, is a or the major cause of chimeric DNA and RNA (On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27).

The previous post in this series is here.