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A post written by a developer, Bert Hubert, explains in an interesting way how the new one works. Anti-COVID vaccine whose administration began on December 27, 2020 in the European Union, and also in Italy. The explanation, in fact, is made from an IT point of view, treating the vaccine genome as if it were him source code of a program. The heart of BNT162b2 vaccine mRNA in fact, it is contained in a digital code also published on the website of the World Health Organization (WHO).
This 4284 character code was sent to a “DNA printer” (which costs around $ 50,000), which is a device capable of producing DNA sequences from a digital code. In this article we will greatly simplify the procedure, which is actually several orders of magnitude more complex.
The DNA printer, in fact, produces small amounts of DNA that can be converted to RNA only after various chemical and biological steps. As is known, in fact, the BioNTech Pfizer vaccine is mRNA, and this represents a great difference from the past that, among other things, has alarmed (unjustifiably) some. It should also be remembered that we have been working on these types of solutions for about 30 years and that they have already been designed to combat Ebola and Zika (although the anti-COVID solution will have a much greater diffusion).
Returning to the vaccine-computer similarity, Hubert compares RNA with the RAM of a computer, while DNA would be the SSD. Just as the computer does not execute the code directly from the SSD but from the system memory, for something to happen in the organism it is necessary to copy the code to another medium, from DNA to RNA. The latter has another characteristic in common with RAM: its content degrades very quickly, both that produced by cells naturally and that introduced with a vaccine. It is the reason why the BioNTech Pfizer mRNA Vaccine It must be stored at very low temperatures (Moderna, for example, can be stored at -20 ° C).
Let’s talk about first mRNA vaccine, with an underlying function that differs significantly from previous vaccines. While a weakened (attenuated) version of the virus or its components is generally used in vaccination to prompt the immune system to produce antibodies to use when it encounters the active causative agent, in the case of mRNA vaccines, instructions are injected to produce a particular protein, called protein ‘spike’.
This is the protein that the virus uses to access cells: with the instruction injected in this way, the cell will autonomously produce the external protein that, once recognized by the immune system, will activate the production of antibodies. Regarding the alleged speculations aboutDNA alteration by an RNA vaccineIt must be considered that, in addition to not having the ‘instructions’ to modify DNA, messenger RNA never enters the cell nucleus, which is the part that contains the genome. In other words, has no possibility of altering DNA in any way they also lack the enzymes like reverse transcriptase to do so.
An RNA vaccine achieves a result similar to that of a vaccine “traditional” (“inform and train our immune system”) but with much more precision. According to Hubert, while the traditional principle behind vaccination can be associated with an analog technique, the principle of the RNA vaccine is much closer to digital techniques.
Why is the mRNA vaccine so accurate?
The injection made with the mRNA vaccine contains volatile material that describes the famous “spike” protein. SARS-CoV-2. Through chemical reactions, developed thanks to the discoveries of various research teams, the vaccine manages to introduce this genetic material into some cells of the body. Pushed in this way, the cells begin to produce Increase SARS-CoV-2 proteins in amounts large enough to activate the immune system. The latter, by detecting the viral spike protein on the outer surface of cells, activates the immune response.
Then Hubert compares the sequence of the genetic code with a digital code. Unlike computers that use 0’s and 1’s, biology uses A, C, G, and T (or U for uracil when it comes to RNA), called “nucleotides,” “nucleosides,” or “nitrogenous bases.” In his brilliant metaphor between biology and computing, the developer sees similarities in the grouping of bits into bytes and nucleotides in codoni. Nature, in fact, groups three nucleotides into a codon, and the latter represents the unit at the base of processing.
As can be seen from the WHO document, the vaccine code begins with the nucleotides GA. Hubert compares them with the two letters that in an MS-DOS environment identify the markers of the executable type, “MZ”. In both cases they help the “system” to interpret the “message” that it is about to receive without encoding the information: MS-DOS will understand that it is an executable, while the immune system will react as if something came from the kernel, in instead of a vaccine. Of course, it is not necessary to inform the cell.
How mRNA is converted to proteins
Back in code, while the traditional characters of mRNA are A, C, G, and U, we find the sign Ψ instead of U (uracil), which Hubert describes as “one of the extremely ingenious points of this vaccine”. Recent scientific discoveries have revealed that If the U in the RNA is replaced with a slightly different molecule, our immune systems lose interest. and it will not attempt to destroy it before it has entered the cells. For this reason, in the BioNTech Pfizer vaccine, each molecule of uracil U was replaced with one molecule of 1-methyl-3′-pseudouridine, denoted by Ψ. In this case we are talking about an artificial amino acid.
Hubert continues in his parallelism with the world of computing because it is possible to send a slightly altered version of a file, which confuses firewalls and security solutions, but which at the same time is accepted as valid by servers, which in this way can get hacked. (in this case, for a good purpose).
Continuing with the process of transforming mRNA into protein, Hubert explains that this is done through an organelle called ribosome. The latter, after reading a strand of mRNA, produces a sequence of amino acids, which then fold back on themselves to form a protein. As it was told the purpose of the vaccine is to induce the cell to produce large amounts of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein. But that’s not all, the proteins must move and be exposed to the cells. to generate the immune response. And this happens through the call signaling peptides.
To make this process understood, Hubert went to compare the code of the virus with that of the vaccine. He noted that for each codon in the case of the vaccine there is a tendency to change the third position (es. UUU -> UUC). The variations between one code and another almost always occur to increase the C and the G. As we said, the immune system does not like the variations in the mRNA code at all and, to escape this control, the U in the RNA. they have already been replaced by Ψ, as we saw earlier. However, research has shown that an mRNA with higher percentages of G and C is more efficiently converted to protein, as well as faster. And this was used in the vaccine RNA by replacing all positions with G and C whenever possible. A signal peptide optimized to facilitate this process, thus allowing the spike protein to be sent to the right place.
It is not all. So far we have understood how the vaccine produces the spike protein, but this is not enough. During the viral infection, the Spike proteins would come “Mounted” on the external structure of the virus. Here, since there is no real virus, proteins must reach the cell membrane of the human cell in order for the immune system to detect them. However, if a free protein were used, it would collapse on itself to form a slightly different structure. In other words, the body would develop immunity to a collapsed protein, reducing the immune system’s ability to correctly identify the viral protein when the virus is actually active.
Studies on this virus are based on those that began a few years ago to counteract SARS-CoV-1 me MERS. It was identified, in fact, that a double Proline bridge in the right place would make the virus-fighting proteins as rigid as the original virus proteins. This is because proline is an amino acid with a very rigid structure that stabilizes the protein in the state necessary for it to be recognized by the immune system.
Finally, the vaccine code ends with several A’s as a measure against immediate degradationIn fact, the mRNA from the vaccine can be reused multiple times, but each time it loses some of the final A’s. When A’s are depleted, mRNA is no longer functional and is degraded by systems naturally present in human cells. This means that after a short time of vaccine mRNA there will no longer be traces and even the proteins produced in the process will still be destroyed (however, having generated the immune response first).
Hubert’s article, which we recommend reading, was very helpful in understanding some of the steps and tricks needed to get to Vaccine for COVID-19 with the hope that most people, having a clearer idea of how the mechanism works, will realize the need for vaccination.
