This past week has been epic for me. Not only did I have the extreme pleasure of volunteering alongside Kevin McKernan and Charles Rixey at Medicinal Genomics, but we have pretty much confirmed how the DNA is in the Moderna and Pfizer COVID shot vials.
Ages ago, when I was presenting the original findings that there was DNA in these vials, I was sleuthing how this happened by looking into the N1-methylpseudouridine modified RNA synthesis pathway as part of Process 2 manufacturing. Process 2 involved using a plasmid/E. coli system, don’t forget. And also don’t forget that this methodology was bait ‘n’ switched and was not safety tested.
N1-methylpseudouridine has a higher melting temperature than Uridine.1 (Higher thermal energy or specific enzymatic activity is required to disrupt base pairing.) What this means in terms of it binding a cognate base is that it will require a very high temperature to rip them apart. Either that, or it will require a specific enzyme. Two examples of such specific enzymes are RNase-H (in us) and RNase-XT (on bench). It is well-known in nerdy science circles that DNase1 – the enzyme the COVID shot manufacturers used to chop up the DNA for endpoint synthesis cleaning – does not work on DNA:RNA hybrids.
Hellbound and Down 