WHAT? MY SHOCKED FACE YET AGAIN? EXCLUSIVE: COVID-19 ‘has NO credible natural ancestor’ and WAS created by Chinese scientists who then tried to cover their tracks with ‘retro-engineering’ to make it seem like it naturally arose from bats, explosive new study claims.
So… Here’s my prediction:
Altering genomes using our current technology is highly dependent on these things known as “restriction sites”.
Briefly– bacteria are infected by a class of virus called bacteriophages, and have evolved enzymes that find specific sequences in double-stranded RNA which are indicative of a viral genome, and cleave them there.
We use these to manipulate DNA to splice into bacteria in labs, by putting artificial restriction sites on the DNA to be inserted and identifying a part of– usually — a plasmid, which is a free floating strand of genetic material outside the main bacterial genome that allows the bacteria to do extra stuff (a lot of antibiotic resistance is carried on specific plasmids and can even be acquired by living bacteria that integrate DNA from dead ones.)
Restriction enzymes make “L” shaped asymmetric cuts, so if you have two pieces of genetic material cut with one enzyme, the two can interchangeably dimerize with each other.