Cold Virus On Ice
The virus debate is heating up and it’s time to remind you what should be, but has never been proven to exist, our friendly neighborhood cold virus. Here I will revive part of a prior post of mine because the first time around I only had 3 subscribers, mom, dad, and Viro the doggie.
Nominated as Chair of a new non-profit called Cootie Busters I was forced into the tedious task of looking at more virology papers.
I looked at ATCC, a famous biotech company’s offer of purified viruses. After staring at many exotic virus photos I finally settled on lovely Human rhinovirus 1B, Purified ATCC VR-1645PQ, it’s a supposed common cold virus. Surely this beauty must have been purified?
Summary of findings:
The original sample VR-1645 was not clearly purified and characterized. No EM confirmation of purity, no pathogenicity confirmed, and no control.
ATTC VR-1645PQ was said to be a purification of its non-purified forerunner. Cool stuff!
The genome was patched together by computer.
Conclusion: no beautiful cold virus was proven to be found.
Investigative trail
The specs say that this product was prepared from ATCC VR-1645 via purification through sucrose cushion, but doesn’t give the methods and I can't find them on PubMed so we can’t confirm the EM purification, pathogenicity, nor if there was a control. So it’s all based on VR-1645 who has a shady background. In addition sucrose cushion is said to be "not perfect enough to purify my virus, because other proteins derived from cells or FBS could be pelleted together with the virus".
Looking at VR-1645, this is the “genome” from the number in the History spec. Below is the J of General Virology paper that was referenced by the genome data sheet in the line above. DNA sequencing was done by computer, not Sanger sequenced from a full virion particle, “...Nucleotide sequences..were collated and analyzed using published computer programs.”
This is the “purification” reference in the Journal Nucleic Acids Research from the above paper. It says, “Human rhinovirus...was propagated...in Ohio HeLa cells. The virus was purified [from] culture supernatant and centrifuging (100,000g, 4hours) through..sucrose gradient.”
They use the word “virus” even though no virus is yet confirmed making their statement a fact before confirmation. Then they mix it with HeLa cells that have lots of genetic material. Unfortunately what was purified is unknown because there is no EM confirmation of the purification, no confirmation of pathogenicity, and no control sample. It’s just stated as fact.
Some folks will send you pages and pages of complex scientific details. Who the hell reads all that shit? You just wanna see pretty pictures right? This is all your getting from this simple proton, sorry guys!
Yours Truly, Proton Magic & Co.
Recent virus debate related posts:
My God man, if you think that's bad, take a look at the two scantily clad pages, THE research launching the dawn of 'corona viruses' in 1967. It strikes me as barely capable of making muster in an undergraduate honours degree project. It's terrible dribble, I mean drivel.
J Gen Virol. 1967 Apr;1(2):175-8. The morphology of three previously uncharacterized human respiratory viruses that grow in organ culture. J D Almeida, D A Tyrrell
https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jgv/10.1099/0022-1317-1-2-175
a runny nose is just your body doing it’s job.