Name: The coronavirus is mutating. But don’t freak out yet.
Uploaded: 2022-04-14T00:25:07.000Z
Duration: 5 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs of deduction & speculation

That it's changing its genetic sequence as it spreads.

of hundreds of viruses taken from people around the world,

and some are starting to diverge from one another.

The term mutating coronavirus might sound alarming,

- And we're gonna try to visualize why that is.

of genetic material surrounded by a protein-based wrapper.

Viruses exist to make copies of themselves.

Mutations are a natural by-product of that process.

The protein that's in charge of making copies

in a spot where there's supposed to be a guanine.

If they both dump their genes into the same cell,

some bits and pieces can get swapped around,

It was likely some kind of recombination event

from a bat swapped some genes with another coronavirus,

That may have triggered a change in the spike protein

on the virus, the part that binds to cells

the protein became good at binding to human cells,

so when by chance it found itself in a human eye or nose,

and jumped to another person, and another,

future mutations could change how it acts, in theory.

whereas those that could harm the virus tend to fade away.

For a virus, a beneficial mutation might be one

that helps it spread by staying airborne longer,

Those kinds of changes could happen with this virus,

A viral genome in New York City might look different

but the viruses are functionally the same.

Someone who is infected with a New York virus

probably isn't going to be any better or worse off

than someone who was infected with a Washington virus.

There are different lineages of the virus,

but there don't seem to be different strains.

A new strain would have a different biological property,

Well, it's partly because this virus is comfortable.

It's already evolved in ways that make it really good

at thriving in humans and spreading between them.

So it's not under a lot of evolutionary pressure

It also has to do with this particular type of virus.

Unlike DNA, RNA doesn't have built-in tools

to repair the mistakes made in the copying process.

They double-check that they're not making mistakes

so they're less likely to slip in the wrong nucleotide.

from all over the world look pretty similar

Many people who have COVID-19 are infected with viruses

that are less than 10 nucleotides different from any others.

The full genome is around 30,000 nucleotides long,

It means the virus isn't changing fast enough

that drugs and vaccines would stop working.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The coronavirus is mutating. But don’t freak out yet.

essentially

process

trigger

thrive