 How in the world can a protein coat that contains some mRNA? How can that be so incredibly disruptive? It's pretty wild to think about when you go from that anatomy to looking at, okay, what is it actually doing in ourselves? Well, the first thing is, as we've said, it's nothing. Nada, nothing, unless it gets into a cell. So its biggest task is to get into and literally into a cell. And think about it for a second. Do you think that the protein coat needs to go into the cell necessarily? Like, what's the important thing that must get into the cell? Some protein coats do go in, but sometimes they just throw in their genetic material. So it's the genetic material that's the important thing. So in this case, the DNA or RNA. That's what, now, okay, why is that important? What is going to happen? What do you think is going to happen when the genetic material gets injected into your cell? Viruses don't have ribosomes. They don't have a nucleus. They don't have a nucleolus. They don't have mitochondria or chloroplasts. I bet there are viruses that infect mitochondria and chloroplasts. Oh, that's weird. I want to know if that's true. They're going to inject their genetic material and your cell is going to go, Hey, look, here's some genetic material. What should we do with this stuff? And your cell, like, follows the instructions. Your cell is a good little cell and does what it's supposed to do with that genetic material. Oh, dang it. You should have followed those directions. But the cells, like, I always follow the directions. I do what I'm told. Sometimes we have to think for ourselves. You don't just follow the instructions that they came from a virus, but your cell doesn't know better. And so it takes the DNA, turns it into RNA, and turns that into protein. Your cell actually assembles, follows the instructions, and part of the instructions involve assembling all those proteins into what? Seriously. Your cell follows the instructions in the genetic material and builds new viruses. And then your cell is like, wow, look at these cool things I just made. I just made it. Look, I made them. And then your cell says, here, I want to share. And exocytosis, all of those new viral particles that it built out into the world. Where, if they're being exocytosed into, say, your blood, then the viral particles, the new viruses that you built, go around and infect other cells. Let's look at SARS-CoV-2 in particular and see how that virus specifically gets into your cells. There are molecules involved that you probably have heard about. First of all, check it out. We've got the particle itself, the virus, and it looks like a little sunshine. I mean, it's really pretty, really, don't you think? Cute little virus. Its spike proteins have a shape that allows them, those spike proteins, bind to a receptor that's on your cells already. This is a receptor that's involved in maintaining your blood pressure homeostasis. And it's called ACE2. So, normal cells. And that receptor is particularly found in the respiratory system. In cells in the respiratory system, many of them express the ACE2 receptor in their cell membranes. Okay, and that's just a normal, healthy, human cellular thing to do. But then SARS-CoV-2 comes along and says, hey, that's the key I'm looking for. And those spike proteins bind to that ACE2 receptor. The ACE2 receptor does normal blood pressure work for us, but now the virus is hijacking it. That causes the binding of the spike proteins to the ACE2 receptor. That causes engulfing of the viral particle. And check out what happens. In this case, it looks like the spike proteins mostly stay on the outside and the genetic material is brought in. And it's RNA. And if you check it out, it looks like the RNA comes in. I don't know what all these other little things are. But the RNA gets processed in the rough endoplasmic reticulum. That makes sense, right? You've got to write a zone who's going to read the code in the RNA and build a protein. Translation is going to happen in the rough endoplasmic reticulum. It gets processed in the... I don't know what that is. The urgic. Oops, you can't see the urgic. Dude, what? It gets processed there. I thought it got processed in the Golgi body. So maybe the urgic is part of the Golgi body. Whatever, however it gets processed, it gets built into a full viral particle that is then exocytosed into the extracellular fluid to go infect other critters. Excuse me. Not just other critters. That's how you are going to infect other critters but those little particles are in you and they're going to go around and infect your other cells because your cells have the ACE2 receptor. It's that simple. You just used the machinery that you already had to replicate and make lots of copies. What? Okay. This was bad. This virus was doing bad things and the disease, COVID-19, was deadly and a big deal. So quickly, word got out. It's really interesting to look at the history of things that I wasn't aware of. I wasn't tracking what the World Health Organization was saying. I remember seeing, probably around February, I remember seeing something on Twitter and somebody was like, oh my God, this virus, there's this weird virus out there and it has this massive replication rate. It makes copies of itself way faster than other things and I'm watching it and being concerned and I was on Twitter going, well, people say things on Twitter all the time and then the pandemic gets declared in March of 2020 and then we all went, oh, that one? Yeah, that one. That's kind of a big deal, isn't it? So scientists were watching it and the next thing I want to talk about is how fast they figured out the sequence, the actual sequence of bases in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. So this little piece of DNA, I mean RNA, that the virus delivered, injected into your cell, it was really fast that the scientists figured out what the actual base sequence of that thing was and I want to talk about how they did that.