As was reported earlier in the thread, several bat influenza viruses from Guatemala and Peru seem to be mutating towards a neurotropic phenotype that may also target T-cells.
Promedmail: 4 Feb 2020 'China National Health Commission [machine translation] As of 3 Feb 2020, 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps reported 3235 newly confirmed cases (2345 in Hubei Province). There were 64 death cases (Hubei) and 5072 suspected cases (3182 in Hubei)....A cumulative report of 20,438 confirmed cases (2 nuclear reductions in Heilongjiang Province....425 accumulative deaths.'
We should first document that the evolutionary history of coronaviruses' link to seafood:
'In particular, the coronavirus X domain and nidovirus HEL1 are clustered with homologs encoded by viruses of the Alphavirus-like supergroup (Gorbalenya et al, 1998). IN contrast, coronavirus RdRp and 3CLpro showed a specific affinity to the homologous enzymes of plant potyviruses (Gorbalenya et al, 1989) (Gorbalenya, unpublished data), and the coronavirus PLpros hit the leader protease (Lpro) of animal aphthoviruses (Gorbalenya, et al 1991). Both poty- and aphthoviruses belong to the Picornavirus-like supergroup. The sequence affinity to the potyvirus 3CLpro was also documented for the homologous GAV enzyme (Cowley et al, 2000, Gill-associated virus of Penaeus monodon Prawns: An Invertebrate Virus with ORF1a and ORF1b Genes related to arteri- and coronaviruses, J. Gen. Virol. 81 Pt 6, 1473-84).'
(Gorbalenya A, Big Nidovirus Genome, in The Nidoviruses: Coronaviruses and Arteriviruses, 2001)
The Luytjes et al study (post #148): '....Conditionally lethal mutations affecting conformations of surface proteins often render these proteins thermolabile. We tested whether this was the case for ts43 and ts379 by incubating the viruses grown at the permissive temperature at 39.5 C for periods of up to 24 hours. Surprisingly, ts43 was unaffected by this treatment. Its titers dropped only by a factor of 6, which was the same as for the control wild-type virus. However, ts379 appeared increasingly sensitive to high-temperature incubation, resulting in at least a 5-log drop in infectivity after 6 hr. This drop in titer was not due to physiological conditions, because the titer of ts379 was unchanged when the virus was incubated at 0C (data not shown). These data indicate that the ts lesion in the two mutant viruses is essentially of a different nature.'
(Luytjes W, et al, Characterization of Two Temperature-Sensitive Mutants of Coronavirus Mouse Hepatitis Virus Strain A59 with Maturation Defects in the Spike Protein, J. Virology [1997]: 949-55)
We'll next link human hepatitis B virus to virus maturation-compromising sugar decoy, deoxynojirimycin, from the mulberry tree, Morus sp., because production of deoxynojirimycin is triggered in the twigs at 0 C.
Avian Flu Talk: ' "Living in the Bay Area, I shudder to think about what will happen once it gets loose in the homeless population here. We are already in a public health crisis from the lack of sanitation and illness and disease thrive in squalor. All the garbage, needles, feces in the streets of San Francisco are bad enough, now we need to worry about corona virus mixed with it." '
There is also a thread titled, Coronavirus to Begin Destroying Global Supply Chain.
We find similar mutations between 2019-nCoV and hepatitis B virus linked to vaccine. Notice that there is only one atom difference between asparagine (5 atoms) and aspartic acid (4 atoms):
Accelerated evolution of Hepatitis B virus was likely via Chinese polyculture (ducks, fish, pigs, etc. using the same pond.)
'....For the sequences in clade II, on the 536th aminoacidic position in Wuhan coronavirus sequence there is an asparagine residue instead of an aspartic acid residue.'
(Benevenuto D, et al, The 2019-New Coronavirus Epidemic: Evidence for Virus Evolution
Having first noticed aspartic acid - asparagine differences in the Memphis 98 strain of influenza (New Mexico, 2006), we now see that the 536th position of the reference SARS virus genome has an aspartic acid whereas it has mutated to asparagine in 2019-nCoV. Furthermore, the bat SARS-like coronavirus has a glutamine residue at position 536, and as Benvenuto et al suggest,
'....Mutation of these proteins could determine two important characteristics of the coronavirus isolated during the 2019-nCoV epidemic, a higher ability to infect and enhanced pathogenicity than the bat-like SARS coronavirus but lower pathogenicity than SARS coronavirus....red circle highlights the presence of an alpha-helix on the SARS-CoV and not present on the 2019-nCoV structure....while the blue square highlights the presence of 2 beta-sheets on the 2019-nCoV (401: KYR and 440: LND) that are not present on the SARS-CoV structure.'
The Washington state patient, 35 years old, was tested by NAAT but turned up negative. It was then that CDC protocols were followed and the pathogen was identified.
Are cocktail therapies for flu and HIV the magic cure for coronavirus?
'....Ascletis, the Hong Kong-listed hepatitis drugs producer, said it has received requests from unnamed medical institutions and researchers to use its antiviral drug candidate ASC09 in combination with ritonavir in clinical trials for coronavirus patients.'
In post #255, we verified that the URL was working, though now, the reader is re-routed to their main page. To retrieve the article on MIV-802, the title must be searched on the internet. It does seem like it's the same Janssen:
Janssen Pharmaceutica Janssen Pharmaceutica - Wikipedia
'....In 1961, Janssen Pharmaceutica was purchased by New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson....was the first Western pharmaceutical company to set up a pharmaceutical factory in the People's Republic of China.'
At any rate, protease inhibitors seem to be front-line meds against 2019-nCoV in combination with others.
'Thus, it remains possible that all or some of these across-borders' similarities have been preserved in the course of a profound divergent and (continuous [italics]) evolution of +RNA viruses, including nidoviruses, from the common root (Gorbalenya and Koonin, 1993). The most distinguishing feature of the nidovirus genome is the conservation of the specific domain arrangement in the replicative polyproteins, which are expressed by the multi-protease-mediated and ribosomal frame-shifting mechanisms. There are other supergroups of +RNA viruses, e.g., Picornavirus-like and Flavivirus-like supergroups, that heavily rely on proteases.'
(Gorbalenya, in The Nidoviruses: Coronaviruses and Arteriviruses)
Wuhan
'....price of vegetables increased dramatically.'
In the Thai cocktail against 2019-nCoV, oseltamivir links to neuraminidase inhibition, whilst remdesevir links to protease inhibition. The two merge with this cutting-edge study, and gives clues to the cocktails' efficacy: