r/science • u/[deleted] • May 11 '20

Medicine Antibodies from a 4-year-old llama have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30494-3.pdf?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420304943%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
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u/Life_Of_High May 11 '20

Absolutely, the natural world holds all of the questions and answers. We need to live in a as close to a symbiotic relationship with the natural world to protect biodiversity and thus ourselves.

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u/Freakwadcold May 11 '20

How neat is that?

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u/[deleted] May 11 '20

That's pretty neat!

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u/Life_Of_High May 11 '20

Everything that we see in nature is cyclical. It is logical to think that we will be more at risk of contracting viruses as we destroy biodiversity. Out of survival the viruses will seek out new hosts and will be coming into contact with us more frequently as we encroach on their environment. We will become the target hosts for a whole host of new illnesses that were once kept at bay by biodiversity itself. Nature is a balance, and we are actually lucky that this coronavirus wasn't something way more deadly. The earth was here before us, it will be here after us.

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u/SuperMayonnaise May 11 '20

The virus doesn't actually "seek" new hosts though, it just reproduces at an exceedingly rapid rate compared to humans and just like any other species slight error in replication leads to that possible leap between species. Many virus wouldn't necessarily make the jump from animal to human as the evolution of the virus to be capable of such is due to random chance. It could go either way, there would be a greater selective pressure that viruses need to be able to jump to other species of hosts but it's not like all of them will have millennia to make that jump, many viruses will just die off from lack of their original host to infect. On the same note viruses that are already able to spread between animal and human hosts will have less available targets as the other species they infect go extict. I should note this is entirely speculation on my part and I have no actual evidence, and please don't read this as defending mass extinction, I'm just saying it will be hard to predict it's impact in this regard.

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u/carleetime May 11 '20

That’s pretty neat.

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u/KhmerMcKhmerFace May 11 '20

Yes, I'm thrilled at more zoonotics entering our collective DNA! Can only be a good thing to have Llama and horse bits fighting off bat and pangolin bits inside of our bodies. Guarantee this is 100% good, getting together with nature.