Can someone explain how "I have my whole genome sequenced by Nebula" relates to the news just now that "The human Y chromosome has been completely sequenced"?
How can someone have their whole (!) genome sequenced already when so far we weren't able to fully sequence the Y chromosome. And this person seems to have a Y chromosome.
because commercial "whole" genome sequences aren't really whole. But, they normally deliver the raw reads to you in a 50+GB file so I suppose you could take the reads in that file that don't map to the previous reference and try to map them to the new one. Unless you are an expert it's unlikely you would get any actionable results.
Since there are people here that seem to know a bit about this stuff, I will take the chance to ask some naive questions ;)
Do I have this right that CAR T-cells have this engineered B-cell/antibody like receptor that recognizes antigens only on the cell membrane. While the regular T-cell receptor can look into cells as well? And that's why the T-cell receptor is potentially better at recognizing solid cancers?
So cancers usually create this immunosuppresive environment, wouldn't this stop this engineered T-cells as well?
Yes, CAR-Ts are really a B cell receptor (otherwise known as an antibody) grafted onto a T cell. Antibody directly binds things like proteins, and usually targeted to things found on cell membranes.
Also on the cell membrane is MHC-1, which shows a short (9-11 amino acid) fragment of protein produced from inside the cell. Our T cells are trained in our T cell kindergarten (the thymus) to not identify our usual self proteins, but detects anything different. They have already been demonstrated to identify single amino acid changes from normal.
Yes, the micro-environment means the immune cells reach a dynamic equibrium. This is because when a cancer presents to healthcare, it is already a chronic process. The T cells are termed 'exhausted', but it's debatable whether this is a good term for it, because they are still active.
A lot of cancer treatment 'shakes up' the microenvironment. This can be enough to tip into a cure. When you make CAR-Ts and adoptive TILS you either pick healthy T cells not involved in the cancer or buff them up in the lab, both in numbers and health.
The hope is that a refreshed army of T cells will push that dynamic equilibrium towards a cure.
I think there is more information than that. There are 20 amino acids, so around 1x10^13 possible sequences.
This is also a clue as to why we don't have a perfectly rigid system, as a library of T cells capable of recognising every combination would weigh 600+ kg.
I had a brain fart. I was thinking of DNA base pairs not amino acids :) Thanks for that.
There are 20 amino acids. Each AA in a sequence represents approx 4.3 bits. So 9-11 AA would be 38.7-47.3 bits. Not quite as much as an MD5 hash (128 bits), but still quite a bit of info.
Again, this is simply not true. Yes, the UK signed one particular contract on Aug 28, so one day after the EU with AZ. However, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
True, the EU even waived its right to sue because delivery delays.
"And as POLITICO reported last week, the non-redacted version of the contract shows that the EU also waived its right to sue AstraZeneca in the event of delivery delays."
I agree with that. However, Martin Selmayr (Secretary-General of the European Commission) recently explained on TV that the slower approval was the reason that the EU is lagging behind the US in vaccations. Well, obviously that slower approval was for "more safety" according to him.
That explanation doesn't make a whole lot of sense since the delay was only a few weeks for Biontech/Pfizer or Moderna. As you mentioned, AZ is not even approved in the US. Europe would need to vaccinate around 50M people in a few weeks.
EU politicans know that the EU has failed at procurement. They now try to cover that up by blaming AZ and explaining delays with additional safety measures.
Oh right, that's true. Sorry. He is now still a European civil servant though. In my defense, I quickly googled his name and that's what popped out first. On TV was announced as "spokesperson of the European Commission", so I thought that was his official job title.
Again: No, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May already.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
No, I've already posted the article that states that the UK signed the contract with AZ in May. There are also other news articles from May 2020 (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/coronavirus-astrazeneca-aims...) that prove that the UK already ordered back then.
That's why it was considered "news" when it was reported that one particular contract was signed by the UK one day after the EU. But that's not the full story, since the UK had binding contracts with AZ well before that.
"The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines, except Italy blocked an export to Australia a couple of weeks ago."
I haven't seen that claim in the article you linked.
"He also denied suggestions that AstraZeneca might be selling vaccine doses manufactured in the EU to other parts of the world in order to make a bigger profit."
It is well known that AZ sells the vaccine at cost. E.g. "... is being offered by the drugmaker at cost during the pandemic and at no profit in perpetuity for low-income countries." [1] That's because the vaccine was developed by the Oxford university and Oxford made this a condition. If AZ makes a profit from the vaccine during the pandemic they would break the contract with Oxford.
It seems the cost price differs from country to country because of different production costs and other factors (maybe shipping).
That article was clearly published in May 2020, I don't assume AZ sneaked that article in. Are you really saying that AZ was faking the press release in May 2020, so that in 2021 they could claim that the UK signed the contract three months before the EU?
Your article from may doesn't say anything about signing contracts, only that they are ready to go.
I've seen the articles mention may, june and august as signing dates of the contract, so clearly there is some 'miscommunication'. And both the may and june date originates from AZ, while the actual date turns out to be august.
There are plenty of articles from May 2020 that all discuss in various words that a deal was struck. If you believe that AZ didn't sign a contract with the UK before Aug 28 then the burden is on you to prove that.
No, there are plenty of articles from which you deduced there was a contract signed by the UK before august.
It's impossible to prove there wasn't a contract signed, it is however possible to prove a contract was signed. Your articles never provided evidence for the date the contract was signed.
No, this isn't FUD. AZ wasn't lying. Yes, it's true that the EU signed one particular contract one day before the UK on August 27. However, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May already.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
The origin of the UKs priority access to the AZ vaccine was due to their early funding of the Oxford vaccine on condition of 1st priority. This was before AZ even got involved. In fact the UK govt had such deep involvement that they were able to veto a deal between Oxford and Merck to manufacture and distribute the vaccine over fears that it would allow Trump to block their priority access through export controls (as Merck would manufacture in the US) so the UK make Oxford partner with AZ. AZ inherited that pre-existing deal between Oxford and the UK govt.
Nobody is lying, the redacted agreements do indeed show that the UK agreement is dated to a day after the EU agreement but that says nothing about when money changed hands or prior deals or commitments. You get a 3 month difference between the UK and the EU because the UK had an agreement with AstraZeneca all the way back on the 17th of May (note: June -> Aug is not 3 months, that's sloppy reporting from your linked website) as can be seen here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/funding-and-manufacturing...
It should be noted at this point that France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had jointly negotiated a deal with AZ in June but my understanding is that after an EU27 vote the EC took over negotiations and you get the final (and first for the EU) deal in August.
Why the redacted UK agreement is dated 28th of August is anybodies guess but some things should be made clear, firstly that the UK started funding AZ in May and not late August, secondly that they did this a month before other EU countries had reached an agreement with AZ, and finally that the EC getting involved added a further 2 months to the negotiation.
Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?
Yep, was thinking of the same thing when I read it. I have 2 gmail tabs in Safari, each taking over 1GB. One twitter that's about 1GB, one Slack that's over 1GB. Some of this is shared memory.
Is it that they don't realize Safari is a multi-process architecture, and they're only measuring Safari's main process?
I’ve tested Safari many times before comparing it to other browsers (and correctly including child processes) and it has always beaten every other browser by using varying degrees of resources less than its competitors. Sometimes a surprisingly large number, sometimes not too much.
But there’s something people need to take into account as well: there’s only so much browser developers can do to optimize the browser. Website developers need to do their part as well. And Google is by far the worst offender in this regard. Facebook isn’t much better.
Most Google-owned webpages you visit are going to use at least 500MB on Safari or 800MB on Chrome. This is nonsense! If they were to develop a native app with exactly the same features it would take at most 250MB of RAM for the largest pages (such as large spreadsheets) and it would be a lot faster.
Compare Google and Facebook webpages to almost any other webpage and you will see they use too much RAM. People are unfortunately getting used to thinking “oh, I have 8 tabs open, that’s too many” when in fact it shouldn’t be.
I know I’m a tab hoarder, I don’t deny that. But using Safari currently have over 13 windows open, each with at least 25 tabs, not to mention plenty of native software running and still have a very fast and functional Mac. It’s not like I have 2TB of RAM either: 16GB of RAM is more than enough to do that. About a year ago (before I upgraded) I did pretty much the same thing with a 8GB RAM 2013 Mac and still didn’t have issues.
The only tabs Safari ever tells me it has reloaded because it’s using too many resources are Google-owned websites. This doesn’t happen with any other website at all from the hundreds of tabs I have open.
I don't have confidence that (in the case of the EU) the same politicians that just claimed that they couldn't foresee any problems with mass production, did everything they could've done to ramp up production last summer. On the contrary the EU ordered quite late and less than they got offered from the vendors. In addition, the EU doubled the ordered doses only this January from 300M (100M of those were optional) to 600M from Biontech, after some EU member states also made additional orders. Imagine these orders would've been made in July. That might have provided the financial incentive for the vendor to e.g. ramp up an additional production line or factory in summer. I can't say whether this would have helped or not, but I certainly don't have the feeling the EU did everything they could have done to make the vaccine available as soon as possible.
My 81-year old grandparents will get their first dose of vaccine on February 28, while other countries are already vaccinating much younger people.
Imaginig that we ordered these doses in July, we would still have had close to 4 doses per person in the EU by July. Ordering more now didn't do anything ggod so far. Especially since these suppliers convientently left out when these additional doses they offered the EU would have been and will be available.
How can someone have their whole (!) genome sequenced already when so far we weren't able to fully sequence the Y chromosome. And this person seems to have a Y chromosome.