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RE: Recipie for a zombie virus - Bringing nightmares to life(Warning: Don't try this at home)
Hey @scienceblocks, this is an amazing read, although pretty disturbing as well! Biologly/Virology is not my expertise, but I hope, in reality it's much harder to actually assemble all these ingredients into a "working" virus than your plug-and-play descriptions suggests? Mankind probably wouldn't exist anymore if it was easy...? :)
One thing often suggested by zombie movies is that they easily lose body parts or break their bones - any recommendation to achieve that?
And the most important question: How to survive your zombie apocalypse? ;)
Yes, it's much harder than that. The aim of my post was to majorly talk some virology in a fun way. Though it is not the impossible to assemble the genes of your choice in viral genome. I use a modified lentivirus(HIV) to insert genes into cells and test their function. But there we cut the virus genome into 3 pieces and make sure that the genes that get packed into new virus particles, only have genes of our choice. We keep the genes required for virus replication separate. So that virus can only infect once and deliver genes. But if you want to make a virus which spreads all you need is to give it it's replication ability back.
The first constraint that one might face in assembling the parts I described is that - there is a limit on size of genome, you can pack inside new virus particles. Some viruses that have multiple genes in their small genomes pack it very strategically. They have overlapping genes with different start sites and they use a special mechanism to express these genes. Getting that kind packing would be a challenge.
And even if you made a perfect assembly, you may need to mutate and select surface proteins in viruses to make sure they reach the sites like hypothalamus. So while it's easy to imagine the Ingridents we require, making it possible would need decades of trial and error.
Regarding the body parts falling apart, it is not going to easy. Plus it would make the zombies weak. But if it was part of the project we can take inspiration form bacteria Mycobacterium leprae(the one that causes leprosy). In its advance stages it causes numbing of limb extremities which make people prone to injuries and infections in limbs and may end up losing one or two fingers. Another way to do the same would be to cause rotting of limbs. Now the exact mechanism of it is not understood but there are rare conditions like Buerger's syndrome and to some extent dermal fibrosis like scleroderma, which stops blood supply to extreme regions of limbs. This causes ischemic rotting of the tissue and necrosis. (Also since we already desire to make our zombies insensitive to pain, they may lose a limb or two just like that anyway).
The best antidote to survive the apocalypse would be immunity against it. But, it will not be easy to make a conventional vaccine against a virus like HIV plus if it is going in nerves it would be hard to track. So there are at least three things that can be done.
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer, and the insights into the assembly challenges! That sounds like experiments like this (hopefully!) aren't going to happen in the near future. You argument about the zombies getting weak by body parts falling apart is true, of course. But already the combination of all other zombie "features" doesn't sound like a healthy combination in the long run. Would they survive once the symptoms broke out? (apart from eating themselves, obviously...)
Hopefully not in near future! I doubt if even people working on bio-weapons(offence of defence) would want to make something so crazy. And even if they tried they wont make a perfect zombie in their lifetime(With all the tools available, it would take 5 generations of grad students is my rough guess).
And now thinking about it, it would be really hard to survive without pain. We underestimate how important pain is to keep us alive. So zombies wont be very sustainable project if it keep losing limbs or keep getting electrocuted, just because they wont realise they are being electrocuted. So I think I will modify them to reduce pain. Or better put a downstrem effector of Ghrelin signalling on DNA as promoter for endorphin genes in virus. So pain is only inhibited when they are hungry(Which makes me wonder what is our natural response to pain during hunger - I'll go check on that).