Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #indels
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Piecing together what we know of the ‘new #variant’. This has been confirmed by COG-UK (tinyurl.com/ybfsqurf) and PHE (tinyurl.com/yacjerx6) as a lineage of #SARSCoV2 carrying a set of mutations including #N501Y, found in the #spike receptor binding domain.
#PHE reports suggest that #SARSCoV2 carrying this variant(s) have been observed at high frequency in recent times in the South of England. At the moment there is no evidence this #variant spreads any faster or any slower. This simply hasn’t been tested yet (and of course will be)
This variant is found in an expanding outbreak but may be going up in frequency just by chance – we always have to disentangle these forces. Viruses mutate (actually #SARSCoV2 a bit slower than many viruses) and the presence of mutations in of themselves is not a cause for alarm.
In 2000 the HGP quoted an audacious statistic about the level of DNA similarity between different humans that was quickly adopted by academics, pro-egalitarian activists, and race-deniers. These groups have loudly championed this statistic with patronizing adulation ever since. 
But is it true? The HGP’s findings were predicated on the assumption that all parts of human genome are identical except for SNPs (changes to single nucleotides that can regulate allelic expression in genes) which they calculated at a maximum variance of 0.1% between all humans.
Studies involving a new trend in molecular genetics called DNA copy number variations (CNVs) that challenges the stat. were first published in 2002 but have been absent from much of the subsequent social commentary and mainstream news articles.
