This year we have all become much more aware of the role of evolution in nature. In fact, we are locked in race against a virus which appears to be evolving rapidly before our eyes. The headlines are filled with daily warnings of new variants of the Coronavirus. And meanwhile the world battles to keep infections under control. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if you take a closer look, in fact, the mechanism by which nature produces variants of the virus is rather simple. The virus sets each cell which becomes host to work making copies of the proteins required to create new viral particles. The virus enters the cell with a single copy of its genome. Within a few days, the cell will be full with several hundred to a thousand new copies of the virus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But due to errors in the RNA\/DNA replication, few to none of these new viruses are likely to contain an exact copy of the viral genome. On average there is an an error in every 10,000 \u2013 100,000 bases. The entire Coronavirus genome is ~30,000 bases long. Given the number of infections recorded, nature must have already introduced to upwards of 100 million billion different versions of the virus to the world (give or take a few million billion). This is maybe not the smartest way – it’s even based on random errors – but it is design exploration on a huge scale! <\/p>\n\n\n\n