gewa

There's a recent startup which wanted to take taste prediction of luxury drinks to the next level with ML:

https://www.mpg.de/18773206/the-signature-of-taste

It doesn't seem like you are very familiar with German politics or culture, but this is definitely an outlier. Freedom of speech is a central part of our constitution. Defamation is one of the very few ways and enforcement and interpretation is mostly restricted to defamation of policemen. This is the reason why this has resulted in an outcry as the proportionality does not respond to the interpretation how defamation is treated legally.

As a German I have to emphasize that this has no support at all in Germany. The uproar was huge today and its seen as a misuse of power by the politician. Especially as he is not acting as a politician but as representative of the public office of interior. The search warrant needs to be issued by a judge and I'm sure there will be formal investigations how this happened. I would not be surprised if he will be forced to resign. There are also elections happening and misuse of power is seen very badly throughout the people.

This has no support at all in Germany. The uproar was huge today and its seen as a misuse of power by the politician. Especially as he is not acting as a politician but as representative of the public office of interior. The search warrant needs to be issued by a judge and I'm sure there will be formal investigations how this happened. I would not be surprised if he will be forced to resign. There are also elections happening and misuse of power is seen very badly throughout the people.

Isn't this, what a housing cooperative are about? They are very common in Germany and seen as valuable cultural heritage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative

I agree, the headline is definetly not what the research shows. See my other comment on non-neutralizing antibodies. Please change the title to the original one.

Please note, that neutralization by antibodies is only one of the many possible ways how our immune system can take action. Antibody recognition is still possible with the found mutant:

"To determine whether 501Y.V2 is still recognized by non-neutralizing antibodies, the binding of polyclonal sera (from Fig.2a) to a recombinant 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 protein and an RBD+SBD1 from the original lineage was assessed by ELISA (Fig.2b). These data revealed that binding of polyclonal plasma to 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 was only substantially affected in a minority of cases (14 of 44 with ≥five-fold reduction, 32%). Most of the convalescent plasma/serum suffered less than four-fold reductions in total binding activity (as measured by area under the curve), suggesting a considerable non-neutralizing antibody component are still able to bind the 501Y.V2 spike antigen"

Please note, that neutralization by antibodies is only one of the many possible ways how our immune system can take action. Antibody recognition is still possible with the found mutant:

"To determine whether 501Y.V2 is still recognized by non-neutralizing antibodies, the binding of polyclonal sera (from Fig.2a) to a recombinant 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 protein and an RBD+SBD1 from the original lineage was assessed by ELISA (Fig.2b). These data revealed that binding of polyclonal plasma to 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 was only substantially affected in a minority of cases (14 of 44 with ≥five-fold reduction, 32%). Most of the convalescent plasma/serum suffered less than four-fold reductions in total binding activity (as measured by area under the curve), suggesting a considerable non-neutralizing antibody component are still able to bind the 501Y.V2 spike antigen"

Its also worth to note that only 44 plasma samples were used from individuals out of a population where the virus probably originated.

This Report from the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium gives a good summary of the prevalent genotypes with UK COVID-19 cases. You can see how the B.1.1.7 mutations N501Y + Δ69-70 and N501Y are very recent and mostly showed up during the last 28 days.

https://www.cogconsortium.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Repo...

In this case, the B.1.1.7 variant has shown to be highly abundant in recent COVID-19 cases in the UK. Much higher compared to other mutations which are tracked too. This is pretty clear evidence of an increased infection rate or evolutionary advantage as there has to be some driving force for this process. Take a look at this Report from the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium. The B.1.1.7 mutations N501Y + Δ69-70 and N501Y are very recent and mostly showed up during the last 28 days.

[1] https://www.cogconsortium.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Repo...

Biochemistry by Jeremy M. Berg, John L. Tymoczko and Lubert Stryer is a widespread introduction to Biochemistry.

Nice to see you on the Frontpage, what an amazing project!. I remember you introduced me to HN 7 years or so ago at some MUN meeting hahaha.

No, the proteins are vitrified very rapidly in liquid ethane at approx. -200°C, so that the structure ist conserved.

Yes viruses are not alive and speaking strictly there are no clades or specieses. But I stopped beeing to strict with terminology like this on HN. Most people are not from this field and don't have broad prior knowledge and so it would just complicate and confuse unnecessarily.

I don't think the article addresses the point right. Yes, there is only one strain of Sars-CoV-2 as the definition of a strain is a strict scientific term. Nevertheless, there are different clades [1] of Sars-CoV-2, which are characterised as organisms with a common ancestor [2]. This doesn't has to imply a changed property, like infectivity or mortality, but it implies common heritage which is of course of interest. You can see it nicely in the the phylogenetic tree of the sequenced genomes [3].

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.25902

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clade

[3] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

I definitely agree about the superiority of RT-PCR and the drawbacks of direct detection. Nevertheless, seroconversion can take between 5-12 days from symptom onset [1]. Therefore it's important to outline the different ELISA strategies (Thank you for doing so!), when discussing diagnostic tests.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502

Yes, there are of course drawbacks. But the direct detection is applicable at the same stage of infection as a rt-pcr and therefore usefull for immediate disease diagnosis. Indirect tests after seroconversion are the easier alternative, and will probably be used extensively in the aftermath, to get solid epidemiological numbers.

Maybe one should note, that there are two possible Elisa based strategies. Yes, You can present some viral protein to detect antibodies produced by the body after serum conversion, as you said. This serum conversion takes at least a week to happen and you need a blood sample. On the other hand you can also immobilize antibodies specific to the viral proteins and directly detect the virus. This is possible immediately after infection and fluids like sputum or saliva can be used. Both strategies are under development for quick tests right now.

Unfortunately viruses are not microorganisms.

That is just not true. There were a few number of cases, where a second test was positive after initial curing. This is being investigated and can be attributed to issues with the test, false positive diagnosis in the first place or various individual reasons. There is no evidence for a fundamental issue with adapted immunity to Sars-CoV-2.

I worked with Pandas and numpy for different projects, and I really like the low level component way how numpy works. In most cases where I used Pandas I regretted it at some point. OOP and numpy in the first place would’ve been a better solution, especially because of the ease of Numba integration.

Please remember, that these ontologies describe biological systems and are used as a standard for common nomenclature. It's orders of magnitudes harder to derive an ontology describing the localization of proteins in the cell by an algorithm, compared to w2v. Even then, there would be the fundamental issue that the ontology needs to be consistent over time in order to be useful.

It's true, that different codons are transcribed with different speed but I've never heard that this would lead to differences in folding. Speed of translation is nevertheless used in order to signal shortage of amino acids or to implement modification.

When you're doing protein expression, it's a standard procedure to do a codon optimization in order to adapt the codons to your host expression system. When you're expressing a human protein in yeast or ecoli the codons will be quite different but the folding is the same. If translation wouldn't show this stability it would be difficult to use foreign expression systems at all.

Im not sure if it's legally flawless to upload the published journal article to your Website and open it up to the public. As far as i know, you're only allowed to pass it on a personal, per-request basis. This explicitly refers to the final peer reviewed article and not to the manuscript, which can make a great difference.

Probably, but he's lucky anyways. For a Croatian fisherman, asking for 20,000 Kuna is like asking for 30 grand in the US.

Yes, but the ester will probably only affect the hydrophobicity and will be hydrolised at some point. I wouldn't expect vast differences in specifity.

This interview sounds like unpublished bullshit, it would never stand reviewing. To claim this from the survey they conducted is just wrong. Every science student learns about the difference between causation and correlation.

These are pretty bold claims. I'm not sure if a single communication from 15 years ago is enough to to build such a relationship. Please note, that any claims about "cancer" in general are hard to make, because they have such variety of phenotypes.

That’s the important point here. RNA analysis by chips or sequencing is nothing new. But there’s always a long way from the lab to the clinic, and its capital intensive to fund a startup in this field.

I always wonder if hackernews knows the difference between research and development. When it comes to biology, I feel like there is a real hubris fuled by fantasy headlines.