cjm
Member
Not sure where to put this so I'm putting it here. Jaclyn Hord keeps posting and retweeting intelligent stuff and seems to be an insider:
Nice link, thanks. Found this neat primer on her new twitter page:
Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
"The source code!
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. The WHO document has this helpful picture:This is a sort of table of contents. We’ll start with the ‘cap’, actually depicted as a little hat.
Much like you can’t just plonk opcodes in a file on a computer and run it, the biological operating system requires headers, has linkers and things like calling conventions."
(...yadda yadda yadda....)
"Summarising
With this, we now know the exact mRNA contents of the BNT162b2 vaccine, and for most parts we understand why they are there:- The CAP to make sure the RNA looks like regular mRNA
- A known successful and optimized 5' untranslated region (UTR)
- A codon optimized signal peptide to send the Spike protein to the right place (amino acids copied 100% from the original virus)
- A codon optimized version of the original spike, with two ‘Proline’ substitutions to make sure the protein appears in the right form
- A known successful and optimized 3' untranslated region
- A poly-A tail with a ‘linker’ in there