V(D)J recombination Archives

Having A Common Cold Is As Good As A Vaccine.

15 December 2020

Learn From The Common Cold. Pretty much everybody now knows that four coronaviruses cause the common cold: duvinacovirus alphacoronavirus HCoV-229E & setracovirus alphacoronavirus HCoV-NL63 and embecovirus or lineage A betacoronaviruses HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43. That’s the common cold that you can catch over & over and which is dealt with by the innate immune system only, […]

Déjà vu – memory T cells have seen SARS-CoV-2 before.

23 November 2020

Newly-Discovered Is Not New. In early September we first highlighted the incorrect designation of SARS-CoV-2 as a ‘novel’ or ‘new’ coronavirus when it should have been designated ‘newly-discovered’. There is a subtle but fundamental difference: something that is new did not previously exist whereas something that is newly-discovered already existed but not been discovered yet. […]