LA JOLLA, CA – It can be a bit smellier than other ways of monitoring COVID-19, but analyzing wastewater is a cheaper, faster and more accurate way for public health officials and researchers to detect rising cases. Bits and pieces of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are flushed down toilets and washed down sinks by infected individuals; […]
Scripps Research Institute
Discovery boosts theory that life on Earth arose from RNA-DNA mix
LA JOLLA, CA December 29, 2020 – Chemists at Scripps Research have made a discovery that supports a surprising new view of how life originated on our planet. In a study published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, they demonstrated that a simple compound called diamidophosphate (DAP), which was plausibly present on Earth before life arose, could […]
Up to 45 percent of SARS-CoV-2 infections may be asymptomatic
LA JOLLA, CA, June 12, 2020 – An extraordinary percentage of people infected by the virus behind the ongoing deadly COVID-19 pandemic never show symptoms of the disease, according to the results of a Scripps Research analysis of public datasets on asymptomatic infections. The findings, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that asymptomatic infections may account for […]
The COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin, scientists say
March 18, 2020 – The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, last year and has since caused a large scale COVID-19 epidemic and spread to more than 70 other countries is the product of natural evolution, according to findings published yesterday in the journal Nature Medicine. The analysis of public genome […]