Viruses - Infectivity and Competition Assays

So to take the alpha varia, and instead of having those ten substitutions that would be consistent with what you observe in delta, just one each of the ten in the alpha back bone. And then they'll put each those ten mutations that revert it back closer to the alpha variant at each of those positions and vice versa. They do these head to head competitions where they a. measure the amount of r and a in competition. So if it was an even competition, that horizontal line at one is where you would expect the rna values to come out. For every one arna molecule of delta, there would be one arne molecule of alpha, et cetera. You can