The coronavirus and some basic evolutionary genetics

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Helpful summaries (I’m also including the earlier one linked) of what I’ve been reading in various articles.

From Jerry’s:

I hope I haven’t confused people too much; the area is quite complex.

So do I get to pat myself on the back then if I understood everything he wrote? :smile: I wonder if he would be surprised about this creationist who is very interested in viral evolution.

With regard to this point:

By a very crude analysis, the UK variant does not show evidence of selection on its protein sequences. The ratio of Nonsynonymous (N) to Synonymous (S) mutations is 13/6 = 2.17, which is very close to the expected ratio of 2.66 for neutral (i.e., unselected) mutation in a completely random genome. The defect of this analysis is that the virus’s genome is of course not random. I would expect that someone with the genomic sequence and the right software is already carrying out a proper analysis using the actual nucleotide and codon distribution of the virus. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already been done; not being a virologist, I don’t follow that literature.)

I’m sure there are a lot of people doing this sort of analysis. One of them is Sergei Pond, a molecular evolution software developer who has written several methods of detecting selection that are popular among virologists.

He’s got publicly available analysis notebooks showing some of the results for tests of selection. See here and here, for example.

My browser no longer open WordPress sites like this, any solutions?

Nothing surprises Jerry. :wink:

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I might be inclined to answer a technical support issue like this in a private message but the same problem may very well afflict others. So here are some things to try:

(1) Clear your browser’s cache. Then shut-down your browser entirely and restart it.

(2) If that doesn’t help, try deleting the WordPress cookies.

(3) Make sure Javascript is enabled.

(Are you using the Safari browser by any chance?)

I don’t know where you are located, but the Jerry Coyne site is subject to censorship in many countries around the world.

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I have tried both already to no avail.

It is.

Chrome.

I can’t access all WordPress sites including Jerry’s and Evograd’s. I am located in Nigeria.

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