Broadly neutralizing antibodies overcome SARS-CoV-2 Omicron antigenic shift: Nature Accelerated...

[NNadir]

...Report.

It's been reviewed and accepted and comes with this note:

ADVANCE ARTICLE PREVIEW

This manuscript has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in Nature and is provided in this format here as a response to the exceptional public-health crisis. This accepted manuscript will continue through the processes of copy editing and formatting to publication of a finalized version of record on nature.com. Please note there may be errors present in this version, which may affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

It's here: Broadly neutralizing antibodies overcome SARS-CoV-2 Omicron antigenic shift

As the paper is in prepublication, the figures are not included in the PDF. I'm logged in to Nature, but I expect the publication is open sourced, whereupon one can read the institutions of the authors, which span the globe, and represent every inhabited continent.

We can take it for what it's worth, but it is, as opposed to a tweet, about to published in one of the World's Premier Scientific Journals, if not the Washington Post and the New York Times, or again, a post on Twitter.

Have a happy, safe, and productive New Year.

[wryter2000]

1. Can you translate the headline for the non-scientist?

It sounds like it's good news, but I can't tell for sure. Thanks.

[NNadir]

2. I'll try. First, note that the paper is not oracular, I just posted another thread that...

...seems to conflict with it, although really the two papers are about different things.

Vaccines, and infections, generate antibodies. These antibodies are produced by exquisite biochemistry in immune cells that are a feature of higher organisms. An important component of this biochemistry is something known as "HLA" classes, which recognize whether a particular protein is "self" or "non-self," that is, an infectious agent.

The RNA vaccines "trick" cells in to making proteins of the virus without actually making the virus. Thus, these trickery proteins induce an antibody response.

Proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids, which are almost always made up of 20 of them, called "coded" amino acids, but may be subject to modification after the protein is synthesized in an organism.

In order to generate antibodies, immune cells look for unexpected sequences of amino acids not registered in the "memory" of HLA classes. Depending on whether these unexpected sequences are present or not, the immune system generates antibodies, which may be broad, or may be highly specific.

This paper suggests that antibodies are generated that can find unmodified sequences in omicron that are also present in other Covid S proteins, the S proteins being the proteins that allow the virus to enter and hijack a cell.

I hope this clarifies it a bit.

[wryter2000]

3. When you say "antibodies are generated"

Do you mean by the vaccines? I so, that would suggest the vaccines are good at fighting off the virus.

Thanks. I don't want to take up your entire day.

[NNadir]

4. The antibodies are generated by immune cells, as a result of exposure to protein sequences...

...produced from vaccines or the viruses themselves.

The RNA vaccines are elegant, since they make the protein sequences of viruses that cause immune cells to generate antibodies within human cells without making the virus.

Historically vaccine proteins had to be generated outside the body and sometimes consisted of the viruses themselves in killed or attenuated form.

[wryter2000]

5. Thanks