Member Info for Monkshood

It was unfortunate that the android update which caused the issue was just before Christmas.
They do seem to have been very proactive in dealing with complaints. I was impressed that they even had someone dealing with the problem on Christmas Day.
They say it affected <0.5% (so 55 customers if they are referring to the total sold to date ) . It would seem almost half of these have left negative reviews on Trust Pilot. Whist this is clearly not ideal, I have read somewhere that customers actually prefer some negative reviews which have been addressed rather than 100% positive ones, so it may not be as bad as it first appears.
That there are only very positive reviews for the product and content bodes well for the future.

The new variant seems to have higher viral loads judged by PCR ct number. Not great in terms of transmission, but it does means that LFTs will be more able to pick up a higher percentage of cases.
'when conservatively inferring relative viral load from Ct values, approximately 35% of S-dropout samples had high viral loads between 10 and 10,000-fold greater than 1 × 106, compared to 10% of S-positive samples.'
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248834v1

RNS from Sept-
Richard Withers
10,000
267p

RNS Nov-
Richard Withers
10,000
227.4p

I can understand the logic, but I am just saying that it is not something that they have said re their covid test. You would also need two independent pairs otherwise you would always have a dependency for a single binding site.

This is not true based on anything put out by the company to date.
Note- I am not saying it is not possible, it would seem the obvious thing to do (you could even use a mix to the S,N and M proteins), but so far they have only ever publicly said anything about targeting the S protein with a pair of Affimers.
If you look at the Q&A when I asked about glycosylation and AS mentioned the D614G mutation, there was no mention of multiple Affimers, just that binding was not affected. Also with ELISA he talks about Affimer pairs rather than multiples.
I have mentioned before the possibility of using two (or more) different detector Affimers linked to colloidal gold to double signal strength but there has never been anything from the company about this.
I though Ophidian was a helpful contributor to the BB when he was posting here but this assertion about using multiple Affirmers needs some evidence to back it up.

Even with the latest English tier 4 extension and Scottish lockdown they have half of their stores open.
With homeware purchases still a popular choice it will be interesting to see how they have fared over the last quarter.

CS-
Affimers detect the Spike protein on the virus' surface.
The question is how long do these persist after the virus has been destroyed?

This is a very astute point. Have you a published study comparing, ct of PCR, ability to detect S (or N) proteins and viable virions?
I have looked but not found anything, but would be interested in what has been shown to date.

Seems to have woken up over the past couple of days. Hopefully bodes well for next year.

Looks like your final numbers were pretty close Horsetrader.
I did not get a 'shedload ' but I did take the opportunity to pick some more up yesterday. This company has so much potential to scale up revenue going forward.

US recovery package passed. It helps schools and transport-
'According to Sen. Warner’s office, the $45 billion for transportation would include $15 billion for mass transit, $1 billion for Amtrak and $8 billion for buses/motorcoach industry. '

Your numbers seem a bit out, 100 per/day since the 15th is not 8000. They were selling 200per/day early Nov , would expect this to have continued until this week.
The inference was that they had 7000 to sell from the 15th, with about 3.5 k sold until this date. If they had continued at 200p/d (as in the first two weeks of November) for 30 days then that would be 6000 until the 15th Dec. If they have sold most of the stock (without much discounting) then this would be approx 600k since the product launch(on 15th Oct) as they got £213k for the first 3.5k units.

They were set to increase the coach services over Christmas - helped by the DoT.
Not sure how this now works with the refunds now offered, but it does indicate the support that that they get from governments and underwrites confidence in their prospects, even in the current environment .

https://cbwmagazine.com/national-express-reveals-full-details-of-extra-services-over-christmas-new-year/

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/928724/S0790_NERVTAG_-_Is_there_evidence_for_genetic_change_in_SARS-CoV-2.pdf
working link..

@GKB47- there is a section at the end of this (from September) that in part addresses you question-

'However, we currently lack the capability in the UK to rapidly and systematically assess the biological significance of detected genetic change. This represents a major gap in our ability to respond and hone mitigations to the virus and requires a coordinated molecular virology-based enterprise. This has to be unpinned by continued sequencing of genomes in patients and we note that work is underway to increase capacity further to enable the sequencing of up to 10,000 whole SARS-CoV-2 genomes per week. The ability to rely on genomic analysis and clinical linked parameters alone is further hampered because viral load measurements (Ct values from testing) are not routinely obtained or if available are acquired using different platforms that does not allow cross comparison. A proposed rapid assessment pipeline of genotype to phenotype changes underpinned by genomic/clinical data is illustrated (Figure 2).'
(See flow in link below.)

S0790_NERVTAG_-_Is_there_evidence_for_genetic_change_in_SARS-CoV-2.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Only about 25% of the shops are under tier 4, with Click and Collect only, hopefully this will give the some scope to offload any excess Christmas stocks in the other 75%.

Nice reference, thanks, but he cannot know if the mutations in the new variant will affect the binding of any currently selected Affimers. The BAMS comment is also pure conjecture, it will depend upon the methodology used, which they have so far not disclosed.

I find the phylogeny fascinating, we are watching evolution in real time.
I think you will find that it is not mutating very fast as it has a proofreading complex.
Note - Immunology is not at all my area at all.
I am sure they are very carefully looking at all of the mutations , the current vaccine's target the RBD - but remember your antibodies will be polyclonal- so to several regions within this domain, it may not be an all or nothing shift but a reduction in efficacy, at what point that drops below a useful threshold I do not know.
Can they tell in advance? They may be able to look at binding to the ACE receptor to determine what changes are feasible/tolerated to get some idea. You could model individual/multiple mutations, select potential ones that still bind ACE, then look whether antibodies from vaccinated individuals still bind.
Other vaccines are coming along that display the N protein or are based on the whole virus so I am optimistic that we will get something that works even if it means having a second, different one, later in the year.

These are the main changes in the new strain-
'The finding of a sub-lineage of over 350 sequences bearing seven spike mutations across the RBD (N501Y, A570D), S1 (H69/V70) and S2 (P681H, T716I, S982A and D1118H) in England requires careful monitoring.'
(note RBD= receptor binding domain)

Thanks Muck, useful explanation-
More details in-
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.14.422555v2.full.pdf

The only way to track changes is by full sequencing, usually using Illumina. This is happening on a world scale, visual representation of the results can be seen at nextstrain-
https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/