Stuart Turville

@ZdenekVrozina @Jjjjjjjjjjg @Nucleocapsoid Chp has high levels of Collectrin and that would consume the solute carriers that ACE2 would potentially chaperone. In that setting… lack of ACE2-solute complexes, Omicrons would be heavily attenuated….. that’s a prediction though that would need to be confirmed in vivo.

So, phenotypes such as syncytia, tropism, or barrier dysfunction are emergent properties of the interaction between SARS2 and the cellular context - not fixed intrinsic traits of the virus itself. And how this manifests in the Chp remains unclear, as it is inherently tissue specific.

I haven't posted in a while as we've been scratching our heads for the last year trying to understand a virus that spreads amongst. For us it was to understand how a virus that caused our most recent pandemic changed. It was also crucial to resolve for continued surveillance.

New article by @kakape on GISAID, data sharing, & apps being cut off. It's not about COVID - it's about *all* viral data, it's about data sharing being step 1 for preparedness, response, & treatment/vaccines. So we should ensure our DBs live up that. science.org/content/articl…

@CovidSafeNZ @Tuliodna Others have looked at this specifically with KP.2 based formulations. Eg. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41288098/ Any booster will help with increasing breadth across all variants. Some a little better when matched well.

@StuartTurville @Tuliodna Does this have any implications for the efficacy of the JN.1 vaccine vs the LP.8.1 vaccine which builds a better response against XFG? The LP.8.1 vaccine is approved but not yet available here in NZ.

SARS-CoV-2 continue to surprise us with evolutionary jumps. In this pre-print, we describe the Identification and genomic characterisation of BA.3.2: a highly divergent BA.3-related SARS-CoV-2 lineage from southern Africa. A thread 🧵 medrxiv.org/content/10.648…

@Tuliodna 15. As for other tissue and transmissibility, it may need a few more changes to establish better ACE2 binding and then TMPRSS2 to get to levels like we saw with JN.1. But this lineage and many others are still with us and worth monitoring for key phenotypic changes in the future

@Tuliodna 14. The complications of lower respiratory infections observed with earlier pre-omicron variants may indeed not transpire as the requirements for replication are not favourable in that tissue. i.e. RAS-ACE2 attenuates BA.3.2.2 and other Omicrons as it reduces TMPRSS2 use.

@Tuliodna Beautiful work led by Graeme and Tulio. Only thing to add would be what is observed by ourselves and others in phenotyping of this particular virus. With respect to phenotyping, primary isolates are best to look (with the exception of neutralisation assays). A thread: